You still have to establish a nexus between the fund raising and the terrorist act. The Animal Liberation Front may bomb a research lab, but this doesn't mean you can then arrest everyone who doesn't like testing on animals. You could however pursue both the bombers and those that provided the funds for the bombing, if the funds were given knowing they would allow for a terrorist act to be committed.

What is not clear to me however is what a legal category of no Miranda rights for US citizens declared by the State to be X would look like; ditto where they could lose their citizenship, as proposed by Senator Lieberman.

U.N. Official to Ask U.S. to End C.I.A. Drone StrikesBy CHARLIE SAVAGEPublished: May 27, 2010

WASHINGTON — A senior United Nations official is expected to call on the United States next week to stop Central Intelligence Agency drone strikes against people suspected of belonging to Al Qaeda, complicating the Obama administration’s growing reliance on that tactic in Pakistan.

Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said Thursday that he would deliver a report on June 3 to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva declaring that the “life and death power” of drones should be entrusted to regular armed forces, not intelligence agencies. He contrasted how the military and the C.I.A. responded to allegations that strikes had killed civilians by mistake.

“With the Defense Department you’ve got maybe not perfect but quite abundant accountability as demonstrated by what happens when a bombing goes wrong in Afghanistan,” he said in an interview. “The whole process that follows is very open. Whereas if the C.I.A. is doing it, by definition they are not going to answer questions, not provide any information, and not do any follow-up that we know about.”

Mr. Alston’s views are not legally binding, and his report will not assert that the operation of combat drones by nonmilitary personnel is a war crime, he said. But the mounting international concern over drones comes as the Obama administration legal team has been quietly struggling over how to justify such counterterrorism efforts while obeying the laws of war.

In recent months, top lawyers for the State Department and the Defense Department have tried to square the idea that the C.I.A.’s drone program is lawful with the United States’ efforts to prosecute Guantánamo Bay detainees accused of killing American soldiers in combat, according to interviews and a review of military documents.

Under the laws of war, soldiers in traditional armies cannot be prosecuted and punished for killing enemy forces in battle. The United States has argued that because Qaeda fighters do not obey the requirements laid out in the Geneva Conventions — like wearing uniforms — they are not “privileged combatants” entitled to such battlefield immunity. But C.I.A. drone operators also wear no uniforms.

Paula Weiss, a C.I.A. spokeswoman, called into question the notion that the agency lacked accountability, noting that it was overseen by the White House and Congress. “While we don’t discuss or confirm specific activities, this agency’s operations take place in a framework of both law and government oversight,” Ms. Weiss said. “It would be wrong to suggest the C.I.A. is not accountable.”

Still, the Obama administration legal team confronted the issue as the Pentagon prepared to restart military commission trials at Guantánamo Bay. The commissions began with pretrial hearings in the case of Omar Khadr, a Canadian detainee accused of killing an Army sergeant during a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002, when Mr. Khadr was 15.

The Pentagon delayed issuing a 281-page manual laying out commission rules until the eve of the hearing. The reason, officials say, is that government lawyers had been scrambling to rewrite a section about murder because it has implications for the C.I.A. drone program.

An earlier version of the manual, issued in 2007 by the Bush administration, defined the charge of “murder in violation of the laws of war” as a killing by someone who did not meet “the requirements for lawful combatancy” — like being part of a regular army or otherwise wearing a uniform. Similar language was incorporated into a draft of the new manual.

But as the Khadr hearing approached, Harold Koh, the State Department legal adviser, pointed out that such a definition could be construed as a concession by the United States that C.I.A. drone operators were war criminals. Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department general counsel, and his staff ultimately agreed with that concern. They redrafted the manual so that murder by an unprivileged combatant would instead be treated like espionage — an offense under domestic law not considered a war crime.

“An accused may be convicted,” the final manual states, if he “engaged in conduct traditionally triable by military commission (e.g., spying; murder committed while the accused did not meet the requirements of privileged belligerency) even if such conduct does not violate the international law of war.”

Under that reformulation, the C.I.A. drone operators — who reportedly fly the aircraft from agency headquarters in Langley, Va. — might theoretically be subject to prosecution in a Pakistani courtroom. But regardless, the United States can argue to allies that it is not violating the laws of war.

Mr. Alston, the United Nations official, said he agreed with the Obama legal team that “it is not per se illegal” under the laws of war for C.I.A. operatives to fire drone missiles “because anyone can stand up and start to act as a belligerent.” Still, he emphasized, they would not be entitled to battlefield immunity like soldiers.

Mary Ellen O’Connell, a Notre Dame University law professor who has criticized the use of drones away from combat zones, also agreed with the Obama administration’s legal theory in this case. She said it could provide a “small modicum” of protection for C.I.A. operatives, noting that Germany had a statute allowing it to prosecute violations of the Geneva Conventions, but it does not enforce domestic Pakistani laws against murder.

In March, Mr. Koh delivered a speech in which he argued that the drone program was lawful because of the armed conflict with Al Qaeda and the principle of self-defense. He did not address several other murky legal issues, like whether Pakistani officials had secretly consented to the strikes. Mr. Alston, who is a New York University law professor, said his report would analyze such questions in detail, which may increase pressure on the United States to discuss them.

Why Has Holder Indicted the Times Square Bomber?The DOJ is running up against the limits of the civilian justice system

After the initial spate of chest-beating, we hadn’t heard much from the Justice Department about the case of would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad and the many ways it illustrates how splendidly the criminal justice system performs in terrorism cases — even the cases of enemy combatants who could otherwise be held indefinitely and interrogated for intelligence purposes.

Now comes word from the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York that Shahzad has been indicted. He is charged with ten terrorism counts, ranging from bombing and terrorism conspiracies to the transportation and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. This is a strange development.

Attorney General Eric Holder has been telling anyone who would listen that Shahzad is cooperating and providing valuable information. Civilian due process has been no obstacle at all, Holder insists: no problem posed by Miranda, the appointment of counsel, the prospect of providing discovery, and the dynamics of plea-bargaining. Yet it is highly unusual to indict a cooperator, precisely because it is so strategically disadvantageous to the government. When someone is cooperating, the standard practice is to strike a deal, complete with a cooperation agreement and a guilty plea, in what is known as a “criminal information,” rather than to file an indictment.

It usually works this way: Once the cooperator has given the Justice Department and the investigators the broad outline of his criminal culpability, and once the government is satisfied that the cooperator is being candid and not holding anything back, the prosecutors and defense counsel agree to a set of charges to which the cooperator will plead guilty. Both sides sign a cooperation agreement. This is a contract, requiring the cooperator to continue providing truthful information in exchange for the government’s commitment to file a cooperation motion. That motion enables, but does not require, the sentencing judge to impose a lenient term of incarceration — i.e., less time than the cooperator would get (life imprisonment in this case, almost certainly) if he weren’t spilling the beans.

A prosecutor indicts people only if he thinks he may have to go to trial against them. Getting an indictment requires putting witnesses before the grand jury and eliciting testimony that is likely to be the subject of defense-counsel scrutiny down the road. You don’t do that if you can avoid it. That’s why cooperating defendants are asked to waive indictment and plead guilty in an information. An information is a charging instrument brought in the name of the U.S. attorney, not the grand jury. It doesn’t subject prosecutors to the burdens and headaches of presenting evidence and testimony.

Usually, the prosecutor and a cooperator’s lawyer also collaborate on an “allocution.” This is a statement by the cooperating defendant given during a guilty-plea hearing, in which the judge asks the defendant to explain in his own words what he did that makes him guilty. The allocution is carefully scripted, because it is anticipated that a cooperating defendant may one day be a witness against other conspirators. The lawyers for these other culprits will be able to use the allocution in cross examination, so the government wants to make sure the cooperator has admitted everything he should admit and implicated everyone he is in a position to implicate. Any omissions could critically damage cases that are based on the cooperator’s testimony.

#pageFiling an information suggests that there’s significant cooperation. An indictment, on the other hand, is the throwdown moment in a criminal case, the opening bell for the first round of a prize fight. It signals that the parties have been unable to work out an agreement and are in an antagonistic posture.

The indictment doesn’t mean that a guilty plea cannot be worked out at some later point. What it probably does mean is that Shahzad’s relationship with the government is on the rocks. We don’t know exactly why this is so, but we can hazard an educated guess: Despite Holder’s protestations to the contrary, immediately bringing a person into the civilian criminal-justice system, with its rigorous due-process rules, is fraught with complications that make it very difficult for the government to gather intelligence without interruption.

Once you arrest a person in the civilian system, he gets a lawyer. That lawyer’s job is not to cooperate with the government. To the contrary, his job is to make the government live up to its burden of proof, to give the defendant the same expertise in manipulating the legal system the government has. A competent defense lawyer strikes a plea deal with the government only after exhaustively studying the case, pressing the government for every possible concession, and deciding that a guilty plea — rather than indictment and trial — is in the defendant’s best interests.

In Shahzad’s case, the government wants intelligence. It wants both to protect national security and to obtain a conviction. Those goals are often in conflict, but that’s not the defense lawyer’s problem. His job is to get the best possible result for his client, which usually means exploiting the government’s problems, not solving them.

Shahzad’s lawyer knows Holder is deeply invested in showing that the criminal-justice system can handle terrorism cases just as well as, or better than, any military system. Counsel also knows (a) that Holder defines success by whether the Justice Department gets a conviction (not by how much valuable intelligence the government obtains), and (b) that Holder has shown a willingness to plead cases on the cheap in order to get a conviction (see, e.g., the case of Ali al-Marri, an al-Qaeda terrorist who was allowed to plead guilty to a relatively minor charge, which resulted in a sentence that renders him eligible for release in about six years).

The government desperately wants Shahzad’s cooperation and his conviction, but hanging tough is cost-free for the defendant at this point. If the government expects him to accept life imprisonment, his lawyer will figure: “We might as well go to trial.” Prosecutors are no doubt telling Shahzad that, if he continues cooperating, the sentencing judge may cut him a break down the road. But defense counsel knows Shahzad will never have as much leverage as he does now. He doesn’t want a speculative possibility of leniency; he wants something concrete, and he wants it up front. He wants a ceiling on the amount of prison time he will have to do — just like al-Marri got.

Of course, the attorney general will not want to give this to him. Shahzad tried to kill hundreds of people. If he were to get a deal that capped his sentence at, say, 20 years, with the possibility of an additional shave by the sentencing judge at some future date, the public would go ballistic. Nevertheless, defense counsel knows that if there is no plea deal, then the discovery rules kick in. Now that he has been indicted, Shahzad will be able to demand of the government all the information in the government’s files that could be material to preparing his defense.

Think that could be a problem? You bet it could. To cite only the most obvious concern, the indictment alleges that Shahzad conspired with and was trained by the Pakistani Taliban. Any good defense lawyer is now going to demand all the sensitive intelligence in the government’s possession about that organization: What has the Pakistani intelligence service told U.S. authorities about the Taliban? If the Taliban is really in a terrorist conspiracy to attack New York City, why hasn’t the State Department ever designated it a terrorist organization?

#pageAnd what about witnesses? When, counsel will demand, will Shahzad be given access to the Taliban prisoners in the custody of Pakistan and the U.S. military, prisoners who may have provided information that Pakistan shared with the United States? After all, the government says it has a very effective working relationship with Pakistan and its intelligence agency, right? They even coordinated on this case, right? So, surely, the Obama Justice Department can lean on Pakistan to cough up all its intelligence files and informants, right? Oh, and by the way, the press keeps saying that parts of that rascally Pakistani intelligence service are actually in cahoots with the Taliban — could you show us your files on that, too?

Those are just the most obvious complications a Shahzad trial could pose for the U.S. war effort . The demands defendants make for mountains of information from government files always grow even larger once lawyers start looking at the first tranches of discovery.

And here’s the kicker: It’s all about tactics. Most of the information Shahzad will demand won’t really help his case at all. He will demand it because he knows the government will not want to disclose it. If the government refuses to turn it over, that could induce the trial judge to start striking parts of the government’s case, as happened in the Zacarias Moussaoui circus in federal court a few years back. DOJ resistance could create appellate issues that would put a conviction in jeopardy. It could create severe tension between the prosecutors and the trial judge that could hurt the government’s case in various other ways (again, see Moussaoui’s trial).

None of this had to happen. Shahzad could have been held as an enemy combatant and interrogated without counsel. In al-Marri’s case, and in the case of Jose Padilla, the government detained enemy combatants for years before turning them over to the criminal-justice system for trial. The statute of limitations on bombing attempts gives the government plenty of leeway to delay charging a defendant for years if there are good reasons for delay — and war is a better reason than any.

When you detain a war criminal without counsel, he is more apt to tell you much of what he knows. Those statements probably won’t be admissible at trial, but they may not be necessary to secure a conviction; in any event, it’s more important to the war effort to get the intelligence. By contrast, when you bring a war criminal into the civilian criminal-justice system while the war is ongoing, you empower him — with lawyers, with investigators, with discovery rights, with subpoena power, and with the complex dynamics of plea negotiations.

Rife with lawyers who spent the last several years volunteering their services to terrorists and deriding the Bush/Cheney law-of-war approach to counterterrorism, the Obama administration chose to empower Faisal Shahzad. Top officials at the White House, the Justice Department, the intelligence community, and the military evidently convinced themselves that doing so would be cost-free. They may soon learn the hard way that it is not.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

The fact that some of these will go to civilian court giving terrorists rights they do not deserve for PR purposes when they think they can win anyway and some of these will stay in military tribunals to protect our secrets and get a better conviction rate tells me the administration is receiving mixed and confusing polling data on the issue.

The fact that some of these will go to civilian court giving terrorists rights they do not deserve for PR purposes when they think they can win anyway and some of these will stay in military tribunals to protect our secrets and get a better conviction rate tells me the administration is receiving mixed and confusing polling data on the issue.

Polling Data is part of the problem. They were elected on their platform and principles, if they can't be trusted to follow those instead of what could be a knee jerk of the moment, then what are they doing there.........

Thomas L. Norman’s Risk Analysis and Security Countermeasure Selection is a relentlessly practical book intended to aid security consultants, of which Norman is one. There are literally dozens of codes, standards, and risk assessment methodologies that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security accepts for different institutions and infrastructures.

As he details the excruciating process of assessing the risks from all “threat actors,” including economic criminals, nonterrorist violent criminals, “subversives,” and petty criminals, he gets around to saying some important things about terrorists.

[T]errorists are not necessarily interested in taking out a facility but are very interested in communicating through the use of violence. . . . Terrorists use violence as language. The language of violence causes a public debate, not only about the terrorist act, but also about the causes of it and what can be done about it. Terrorists speak through violence to the public directly, past the national leadership. (page 167)

This is not a strategy book nor a counterterrorism book, but it touches on counterterrorism strategy in a similar, sensible way.

Deterrence occurs when potential threat actors evaluate the risks and rewards of an attack and determine that the risk is not worth the reward. . . . For terrorists, this could mean that an attack is not likely to succeed, that their attack would not capture the media’s attention, or that they could be perceived negatively by their own constituency. (page 252)

The success or failure of a given attack matters some to terrorists, but perceptions—the salience of their menace, and interpretations of events among key audiences—matter just as much.

These ideas—common sense among security professionals—seem not yet to have taken hold among policymakers and opinion leaders. This is why Joshua Alexander Geltzer’s U.S. Counter-Terrorism Strategy and al-Qaeda: Signaling and the Terrorist World View is such an important book.

Built on copious research, including more than forty interviews with administration figures, other policymakers, and experts, the book examines the communicative aspects of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies. According to Geltzer, the ten messages U.S. policymakers sought to convey included: taking action; signaling a change; using force; capability; resolve; relentlessness; focus on state sponsors; democracy; visible, layered defense; and success.

But the audience for these messages did not interpret them as officials hoped. ”[G]iven the belief structure characterising those drawn to al-Qaeda,” Geltzer concludes, ”the Bush administration’s counter-terrorist communications [proved] contrary to American efforts to thwart al-Qaeda and to contain the threat the group poses.” (page 133)

In his research for the book, Geltzer found remarkable candor among American officials responsible for Bush Administration counterterrorism policy. In a March 2007 interview, for example, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told Geltzer, “We’ve never understood the nature of the enemy, in Iraq or more broadly the war on terror.” (page 39)

U.S. “relentlessness,” for example, did al Qaeda a favor by raising its profile to heights it could never have achieved itself. “Al-Qaeda has cultivated publicity, using America as the group’s promoter,” reports Geltzer, ”with al-Zawahiri apparently telling bin Laden, ‘Let the Americans become your personal media agents — they’ve got the biggest PR machine in the whole world.’” (page 121)

“Visible, layered defense,” likewise, offered as much encouragement to al Qaeda and its sympathizers as deterrence. “For some of those drawn to al-Qaeda, martyrdom has more meaning than victory,” reports Getzler. “There is no ‘obligation to produce a result’ in jihad: it is an affair between the believer and God and not between the mujahid and his enemy. . . . While homeland security may offer many potential practical benefits, sending a deterrent message to those inspired by martyrdom does not appear to be among them.” (page 129)

Importantly, the book betrays no anti-Bush sentiment. It is careful, clinical reporting on, and analysis of, the counterterrorism policies of the administration that had to invent them after the 9/11 attacks.

Consistent with the theme of the book, Geltzer has some prescriptions for counterterrorist signaling that will undermine terrorism:

In addition to calling far less attention to its own actions, America should call far less attention to al-Qaeda — and, moreover, should almost always avoid naming the terrorists themselves. . . . While the political profit to any American politician of constantly naming al-Qaeda persists, resisting that temptation would frustrate al-Qaeda’s strategy of elevating its own status and framing its campaign against America as a viable enterprise in which all Muslims worldwide should enlist, aid and abet. Not only should al-Qaeda and its leaders be named less by American officials, but the label of al-Qaeda also should not be used to describe what are, in truth, diverse and splintered militant Islamist movements, organizations and networks. (page 145)

When the next terrorism-related event occurs, listen carefully to how U.S. politicians respond. Be wary of politicians who lend terrorism strength by touting the threat and unifying it under the “al Qaeda” banner.

Terrorizing Ourselves, a Cato book I co-edited with Benjamin Friedman and Chris Preble addresses many other dimensions of the terrorism problem with similar insight, I think.

How a Bagram Detainee Foiled the Euro Terror Plot The plan was disrupted because we were lucky enough to have the key witness in detention. It's a shame we didn't try to extract similar intelligence from Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.

By MICHAEL B. MUKASEY The terrorism alert issued this week to Americans traveling abroad, and the events that generated it, have put in bold relief yet again dilemmas we face—some self-created—in our ongoing struggle with militant Islamists.

On the surface, the news certainly is not all bad. A German citizen of Afghan descent captured in Afghanistan disclosed a plot to American interrogators at the Bagram Air Field prison. The plan, Ahmed Sidiqi said, was to conduct coordinated attacks on tourists in European cities, and it involved other naturalized German citizens from Afghanistan. U.S. authorities issued a terrorism alert to travelers, and on Monday five of the conspirators, along with three Pakistanis and three others of undisclosed nationality, were killed in a drone strike in North Waziristan.

So far so good. One captured terrorist in military custody since July—at a location that prevents him, at least for the moment, from hauling his captors into a U.S. court—discloses valuable intelligence that appears to have headed off, at least for the moment, an atrocity.

Below the surface, the news is more troubling. Sidiqi and his associates are German citizens; that, and the arrest of a French citizen of Algerian origin as a suspected member of al Qaeda (plus 11 other arrests in southern France), make it plain that Islamist terrorists are succeeding in recruiting people whose passports give them free entry into all the countries of the European Union, and facilitate their travel in general. In 2009 and 2010 alone some 43 American citizens or residents of various backgrounds have been arrested here and abroad for terrorist-related activity, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center's National Security Preparedness Group.

Further, Sidiqi and those of his colleagues killed in the drone strike were recruited at the Taiba mosque in Hamburg, the same mosque attended by Mohammed Atta, the lead plotter among the 9/11 hijackers. And this group was said to have been planning simultaneous attacks of the sort carried out in November 2008 in Mumbai by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group based in Pakistan.

Two items are worthy of note. First, the simultaneous attacks: This was a characteristic not only of 9/11 and the attacks on U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, but also of the 1995 plot led by Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called blind sheikh. That conspiracy meant to detonate near-simultaneous bombs at landmarks around New York, including the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, the George Washington Bridge and the United Nations. In tape-recorded conversations the plotters discussed what they thought would be the especially demoralizing effect on their enemies, and the correspondingly aggrandizing effect on them, of simultaneity.

Second, the Mumbai attack was notable for its ability to rivet the world's attention for an extended period of time. Terrorists cherish that sort of attention.

All of which is to say that the tourist plot is of a piece with what we have faced, whether we were aware of it, for more than two decades. Are we taking the steps necessary to deal with it?

Here again, the news certainly isn't all bad. Our intelligence capabilities have been stepped up considerably in recent years, particularly with regard to electronic surveillance. The laws and regulations necessary to allow the government to use the techniques it needs are in place. And the Obama administration, commendably, has said it will seek legislation compelling service providers to have available the means necessary to permit the government to conduct Internet surveillance when authorized by warrant. In addition, guidelines put in force at the end of 2008 have empowered the FBI to gather intelligence domestically using conventional surveillance techniques and human sources.

Yet in other respects we seem stymied. Look no further than this week's headlines. How do we deal with the people planning simultaneous attacks on tourists—likely to be principally Americans—in Europe?

The government seems to present us only with the choice that we kill them with drones or give them Miranda warnings and access to a 24-karat justice system designed for conventional criminals. There are better ways, including but not limited to military commissions already provided by law but shunned by the administration, or other special- purpose tribunals that can be established by Congress.

Detaining terrorist conspirators for intelligence-gathering purposes—wholly apart from whatever they may be charged with planning or doing—does not appear to be an option for this administration, certainly not if they are apprehended in this country while seeking to detonate a bomb in an airplane over Detroit or in an SUV near Times Square. Those who joined the orgy of self-congratulation after this week's sentencing of Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad might, when they sober up, consider what we did not find out about who sent him and who else may be on the way— because Shahzad was valued more as a defendant than as an intelligence source.

We will not always be so fortunate to have our would-be attackers detained by the military at Bagram. And even such detention may be the subject of further litigation if the Supreme Court agrees to review last spring's appellate decision denying habeas corpus to detainees at Bagram. Yet as recently as World War II this country held tens of thousands of war prisoners here and abroad without a single one of them being allowed to require his custodians to answer to a U.S. court.

For us, today, the lesson is clear. The importance of being able to gather human intelligence has never been more starkly demonstrated than in the capture and questioning of Ahmed Sidiqi, and the resulting drone attack. The former director of the CIA, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has likened trying to survive on electronic intelligence alone to trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without looking at the picture on the box. It is human intelligence that provides that picture.

Like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians, we seem tied down; unlike Gulliver, we have woven and tied the strings ourselves.

Mr. Mukasey was attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009.

David SuterTHE Obama administration wants to show that federal courts can handle trials of Guantánamo Bay detainees, and had therefore placed high hopes in the prosecution of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, accused in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in East Africa. On Wednesday a federal judge, Lewis Kaplan of the United States District Court in Manhattan, made the government’s case much harder when he excluded the testimony of the government’s central witness because the government learned about the witness through interrogating Mr. Ghailani at a secret overseas prison run by the C.I.A.

Some, mostly liberals and civil libertarians, applauded the ruling, saying it showed that the rule of law is being restored. But many conservatives denounced it as proof that high-level terrorists cannot reliably be prosecuted in civilian courts and should instead be tried by military commissions.

The real lesson of the ruling, however, is that prosecution in either criminal court or a tribunal is the wrong approach. The administration should instead embrace what has been the main mechanism for terrorist incapacitation since 9/11: military detention without charge or trial.

Military detention was once legally controversial but now is not. District and appellate judges have repeatedly ruled — most recently on Thursday — that Congress, in its September 2001 authorization of force, empowered the president to detain members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces until the end of the military conflict.

Because the enemy in this indefinite war wears no uniform, courts have rightly insisted on high legal and evidentiary standards — much higher than what the Geneva Conventions require — to justify detention. And many detainees in cases that did not meet these standards have been released.

Still, while it is more difficult than ever to keep someone like Mr. Ghailani in military detention, it is far easier to detain him than to convict him in a civilian trial or a military commission. Military detention proceedings have relatively forgiving evidence rules and aren’t constrained by constitutional trial rules like the right to a jury and to confront witnesses. There is little doubt that Mr. Ghailani could be held in military detention until the conflict with Al Qaeda ends.

Why, then, does the Obama administration seek to prosecute him in federal court? One answer might be that trials permit punishment, including the death penalty. But the Justice Department is not seeking the death penalty against Mr. Ghailani. Another answer is that trials “give vent to the outrage” over attacks on civilians, as Judge Kaplan has put it. This justification for the trial is diminished, however, by the passage of 12 years since the crimes were committed.

The final answer, and the one that largely motivates the Obama administration, is that trials are perceived to be more legitimate than detention, especially among civil libertarians and foreign allies.

Military commissions have secured frustratingly few convictions. The only high-profile commission trial now underway — that of Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was 15 at the time he was detained — has been delayed for months. Commissions do not work because they raise scores of unresolved legal issues like the proper rules of evidence and whether material support and conspiracy, usually the main charges, can be brought in a tribunal since they may not be law-of-war violations.

Civilian trials in federal court, by contrast, often do work. Hundreds of terrorism-related cases in federal court have resulted in convictions since 9/11; this week, the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, was sentenced to life in prison after a guilty plea.

But Mr. Ghailani and his fellow detainees at Guantánamo Bay are a different matter. The Ghailani case shows why the administration has been so hesitant to pursue criminal trials for them: the demanding standards of civilian justice make it very hard to convict when the defendant contests the charges and the government must rely on classified information and evidence produced by aggressive interrogations.

A further problem with high-stakes terrorism trials is that the government cannot afford to let the defendant go. Attorney General Eric Holder has made clear that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 plotter, would be held indefinitely in military detention even if acquitted at trial. Judge Kaplan said more or less the same about Mr. Ghailani this week. A conviction in a trial publicly guaranteed not to result in the defendant’s release will not be seen as a beacon of legitimacy.

The government’s reliance on detention as a backstop to trials shows that it is the foundation for incapacitating high-level terrorists in this war. The administration would save money and time, avoid political headaches and better preserve intelligence sources and methods if it simply dropped its attempts to prosecute high-level terrorists and relied exclusively on military detention instead.

Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration, is a professor at Harvard Law School and a member of the Hoover Institution’s Task Force on National Security and Law.

Hat tip to BBG on the Cognitive Dissonance thread; pasting here as well:

Obama Caves on Civilian Trial for KSM It turns out indefinite detention isn’t so bad after all.

Let’s review the state of play, shall we?

Throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama blasted the Bush administration’s decision to treat al-Qaeda terrorists as enemy combatants and detain them without trial at Guantanamo Bay. Now, two years into his presidency, Obama has decided to treat al-Qaeda terrorists as enemy combatants and detain them without trial at Guantanamo Bay.

The media is reporting that the administration will hold Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 plotter indefinitely, granting them neither a civilian nor a military trial. This determination, leaked over the weekend, appears to be a rebuff of Attorney General Eric Holder, who had intimated a few days earlier that a civilian prosecution was imminent.

Here’s the difference between Presidents Bush and Obama: The former’s strategy was driven by weighty national-security concerns and maintained despite ceaseless condemnation from the Obama Left. Obama’s strategy — or, more accurately, his drift — is driven by naked political concerns, and his base’s media megaphone has gone nearly silent.

After the most devastating attack ever carried out on American soil by a foreign enemy, President Bush determined that the Clinton administration’s preferred strategy of treating al-Qaeda as a mere law-enforcement problem had been unserious. The criminal-justice system is tailored to address ordinary crimes committed in peacetime America. It is designed to favor the defendants: Americans are presumed innocent and armed by the Constitution with protections that, quite intentionally, make it difficult for the government to investigate, prosecute, convict, and incarcerate. By itself, civilian justice is incapable of neutralizing wartime enemies. Unlike everyday crooks, foreign terrorists operate from overseas redoubts where American law does not apply, where foreign regimes like Iran and the Taliban are only too happy to abet them.

This is not hypothesis; it is our experience. The Clinton Justice Department indicted Osama bin Laden himself in June 1998. He responded by orchestrating, with impunity, the August 1998 embassy bombings in eastern Africa, the October 2000 Cole bombing, and the 9/11 attacks. Al-Qaeda’s onslaught was a war, not a crime wave. President Bush was hardly alone in thinking so: Congress overwhelming authorized combat operations against al-Qaeda, and it has continued to authorize and fund them for nearly a decade. Combat operations necessarily imply not only the killing of enemy combatants but their capture and detention, with the corollary of military-commission trials for those who have committed provable war crimes.

The Bush strategy has worked. Its detractors among self-styled “human-rights activists” — who seem far more concerned about the humans doing the killing than the humans doing the dying — point to the spotty record of commission trials in contending otherwise. But commissions constitute only a small element of the Bush approach, and doubtless the least important one.

The Bush strategy’s key components are twofold. First: Kill, capture, and defund terrorists overseas, thereby denying them safe haven and taking them out before they can act. Second: Detain those who have been captured both to maximize the potential for acquiring fresh intelligence and to thin out the ranks of highly trained jihadists. The enemy may be able to replace terrorists who have been captured or killed, but the new recruits cannot replicate their level of competence.

It is a sad fact that the tireless, heroic work of our military continues without our paying it much mind. It is thus common for Americans to look at all our patent vulnerabilities — subway systems, power grids, sports stadiums, etc. — and wonder: “Why haven’t there been more 9/11s?” But this is no mystery. Dead and detained jihadists cannot execute attacks. A terror network worried about drone strikes on its training camps does not have the luxury of taking the months it takes to plan and execute significant plots. Fresh intelligence from high-level captives disrupts plots in addition to making it extraordinarily difficult for al-Qaeda to embed capable cells in our homeland.

While President Obama has gradually and grudgingly made the Bush strategy his own, he lacks the grace to say so, much less to give his predecessor credit. But it is remarkable to consider how far Obama has come. In June 2008, with the campaign in high gear, he ripped Bush, complaining that

in previous terrorist attacks [such as] the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated. And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world.This critique was astonishing in its ignorance. In most previous terrorist attacks, we had not been able to arrest those responsible — they had been able to keep attacking. Even in the one example Obama cited, the 1993 WTC bombing, several of those responsible were able to flee because civilian due-process protections made it impossible to hold them. Some were never apprehended — and KSM, who was complicit in the WTC bombing and several subsequent plots, was finally captured thanks to wartime operations, not law-enforcement protocols.

Moreover, detaining enemy combatants without trial is entirely consistent with the “rule of law” that applies in wartime. Indeed, the Obama Justice Department has found itself making just this argument, albeit without fanfare. In short, indefinite detention at Gitmo “destroyed our credibility” only with Bush-deranged leftists — and isn’t it amazing how credulous they’ve suddenly become now that their guy is accountable?

In his conclusion, candidate Obama leveled the charge — oft-repeated but mindless — that Bush counterterrorism had “given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in [Islamic] countries that say, ‘Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims.’” Let’s put aside the now-familiar Obama crotchet that gives Muslim sensibilities pride of place over American security concerns. The brute fact is: Obama is treating Muslim terrorists the same way Bush did. Given that, is it too much to ask the president finally to acknowledge that terrorist recruitment is driven by Islamist ideology? The legal theory by which a president justifies the indefinite detention of terrorists is beside the point.

For those who maintain that our president is a pragmatist and not an ideologue, worth pondering is Obama’s ideological intransigence, and how it has bred incompetence. If, back in January 2009, Obama had just let the then-pending military commission go forward, KSM and his cohorts would likely have been executed by now. They had announced their intention to plead guilty and proceed to sentencing. Allowing that, however, would effectively have meant endorsing military commissions and, by extension, Bush counterterrorism. So the new president interrupted the proceedings and dangled before KSM the stage the terrorist had always craved: a civilian trial just a few blocks from Broadway.

The public revolted, prompting bipartisan congressional opposition. Meantime, the president came to realize that, regardless of his purple campaign rhetoric, many committed jihadists could not be tried in civilian court and would kill Americans if released. His law-enforcement framework was impractical: He would have to detain al-Qaeda captives indefinitely or find another way to try them. Consequently, he kept Gitmo open despite having promised to close it; and, with an assist from congressional Democrats, he made a few cosmetic tweaks in the military-commission system in order to camouflage the inconvenient truth that it was substantially the same commission system proposed by Bush and endorsed by Congress in 2006.

But while Obama preserved military commissions, he didn’t actually want to use them. Had he used them, and had terrorists promptly started being convicted and severely sentenced, public opposition to the civilian prosecutions beloved by his base would have stiffened. So now there is one obvious right thing to do: Give KSM and the 9/11 plotters the military commission and execution they should have had almost two years ago. Yet, Obama can’t bring himself to do it.

Instead, the man who claimed that indefinite detention without trial “destroyed our credibility” will indefinitely detain the terrorists without trial — at least until after the 2012 election, when either they will be some other president’s headache or electoral politics will no longer weigh on Obama. That’s change you can believe in.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

By JOHN C. YOO AND ROBERT J. DELAHUNTY When announcing in 2002 that the U.S. would detain al Qaeda fighters at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously described the base as "the best, least worst place." Mr. Rumsfeld's quip distilled a truth: The U.S. would capture enemy fighters and leaders, and their detention, while messy, was of great military value.

For two years, President Barack Obama has pretended that terrorism is a crime, that prisoners are unwanted, and that Gitmo is unneeded. As a presidential candidate, he declared: "It's time to show the world . . . we're not a country that runs prisons which lock people away without ever telling them why they're there or what they're charged with." Upon taking office, he ordered Gitmo closed within the year.

But the president's embrace of the left's terrorism-as-crime theories collided with his responsibility to protect a great nation. Now the reality of the ongoing war on terror is helping to shatter the Gitmo myth and end its distortion of our antiterrorism strategies.

This week the intelligence community reported to Congress that one-quarter of the detainees released from Guantanamo in the past eight years have returned to the fight. Though the U.S. and its allies have killed or recaptured some of these 150 terrorists, well over half remain at large. The Defense Department reports that Gitmo alumni have assumed top positions in al Qaeda and the Taliban, attacked allies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and led efforts to kill U.S. troops.

Even that 25% recidivism rate is likely too low. The intelligence community reports that it usually takes about two and a half years before a released detainee shows up on its radar. Our forces probably have yet to re-engage most of the terrorists among the 66 detainees released so far by the Obama administration.

The Bush administration released many more, but those freed by this administration are likely more dangerous. Contrary to the Gitmo myth, innocent teenagers and wandering goat herders do not fill the base. Last May, an administration task force found that of the 240 detainees at Gitmo when Mr. Obama took office, almost all were leaders, fighters or organizers for al Qaeda, the Taliban or other jihadist groups. None was judged innocent.

All of this is having an impact on Congress, which this week voted overwhelmingly to de-fund any effort to shut down the Gitmo prison. It also barred the Justice Department from transferring detainees to the U.S. homeland. Despite Attorney General Eric Holder's rush to put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial in downtown New York, the planners of the 9/11 attacks will stay put.

Congress is reflecting the wishes of the American people. In the Gitmo myth, President George W. Bush was a Lone Ranger acting without Congressional permission, and Gitmo was a law-free zone. But the American people never opposed capturing and detaining the enemy. And now Democratic Congress has ratified Mr. Bush's policy.

Freezing the Gitmo status quo will stop the release of al Qaeda killers, but it won't end the serious distortions in Mr. Obama's terrorism policy.

The administration relies on unmanned drones to kill al Qaeda leaders hiding in Pakistan and Afghanistan. CIA Director Leon Panetta calls it "the only game in town." Drones take no prisoners, but they also ask no questions. Firing missiles from afar cannot substitute for the capture and interrogation of al Qaeda leaders for intelligence. (The real question now is whether CIA agents will decline to interrogate prisoners, thanks to Mr. Holder's criminal investigations into Bush policies.)

As long as no one is sent to Gitmo, the Obama administration will leave itself two options for dealing with terrorists: kill, or catch-and-release. Mr. Obama's drone-heavy policy means that more people will die—not only al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, but also innocent Afghan and Pakistani civilians.

The Gitmo myth also drove the Justice Department's push to prosecute al Qaeda leaders in U.S. civilian courts. Nowhere else did the Obama administration place its view of terrorism more clearly on display as a law-enforcement problem. The near-acquittal of Ahmed Ghailani, the al Qaeda operative who facilitated the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, by a New York jury last month has clearly revealed that path as a dead end—even if Mr. Holder remains in denial.

The simple alternative is to continue detentions at Gitmo. Detention is consistent with the rules of war, which allow captured combatants to be held indefinitely without requiring criminal charges to be filed. It also keeps our troops and agents in the field focused on finding and killing the enemy, not on collecting evidence and interviewing witnesses.

Using its constitutional power of the purse, the new Congress should continue to keep Gitmo in operation. It should press President Obama to resume the capture, detention and interrogation of al Qaeda leaders. It should also educate the public about the real state of affairs in Guantanamo: The military has spent millions to create a model facility.

Most importantly, Congress can use its oversight power to probe the decision-making that led to the release of the 150 or more recidivists. It can require a full accounting from the military and intelligence agencies of the harms caused by released detainees, and it can bring to light the risks that these bureaucratic mistakes will pose to American lives.

After the left's long denunciation of Bush-era policies, Mr. Obama should admit that he has made his share of mistakes—not the least of which has been propagating the Gitmo myth. If Americans die at the hands of released detainees, we will know who to blame.

Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an American Enterprise Institute scholar. Mr. Delahunty is an associate professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis. Both served in the Justice Department under President George W. Bush.

I know I am going to regret this, I just want to post a couple of pointers, that kept popping up while I was, admittedly, struggling and reading all the data in this post.

As a historian, who spends most of his time at the university, I am really intriguied to know, if most of you guys have done your homework here. I am not hinting at the legal issues of it all, nor the political circus, neither of which I wont and even cant comment, since I am living on the European continent.

To start, the term "Islamic Fascism" alone, sounds very problematic to me. The word Fascism (which comes from the Latin fasces, authority of magisters) isnt some abstract notion, that can be carelessly thrown around events that imply some sort of evil or repression. It means a very specific thing. It means a radical political ideology, that regards a nation as an organic corpus - hence corporativism -, with scraps from the far right and far left of the political continuum. It was greatly influenced by the growing nationalism in the 19th century, and the Sorelian power of myth in peoples lives (Eugene Sorel was a french philosopher and radical syndicalist).The Sorelian myth ironically preety much describes the "Islamic Fascism" in the way it is used in the USA, but I will not go into factual confrontations of this, since I see some guys are terribly passionate about the whole ordeal. And I am here to make friends.

Second, the word Islamic in "Islamic Fascism". Now I am sure you guys know, but there are more than 20 denominations in Islam, besides the lately made "popular" Sunni, and Shia, and the less known Sufi. Each have their own ecclesiastical practices, codes of conduct, ontology, metaphysics, ethics and, yes, morals. Just like christianity has. That is a terrible simplification if I have ever seen/heard one. I guess saying that all right wing politicians in the USA are kkk, with their idiosyncratic interpretations of the Holy Text and citing Old Testament to back up Christian terrorism, would sprout more than one objection.

The third term, which seems important to shed some light on, is the term Jihad. It falls on the bottom of the barrel of "the worst misinterpreted words in history". Somewhere near Marx' class struggle. Or make that preety much everything else he has written. The word Jihad, quite simply means struggle. Internal, external, implicit, explicit. Here are of course more than one different interpretations, but generally this holds much of the same ground :

Fiqh Made Easy: A Basic Text of Islamic Law; Saalikh bin Gahneem As-Sadlan pg. 117-18 (quote info and text is taken from wikipedia)

- Jihad against the soul: Struggling against the soul to yearn for the Religion, act upon those teachings, and call others to them. (Paraphrased)- Jihad against Shaytan: Struggling against Satan without doubts or desires.- Jihad against the disbelievers and hypocrites: this is done with the tongue, hand, heart and wealth.- Jihad against heretics, liars, and evilfolk: This is best done with the hand, if not the hand then the tongue, if that's not possible then the heart."

Again, a very dangerously overreaching simplification.

If one takes a few steps back from it all, and takes a birds-eye view on the situation. Yes the radical extremists can be taken as a legitimate threat, yes they have done terrible things, yes they cannot be reasoned with. BUT, as with any such group, it must be said, that they are always a minority untill they use a situation to fill their ranks with a very specific social demographic, that is usually very passive, neutral and even though I do not like the word, ignorant. They are used, swindled and twisted into their rank and made warriors for a cause. And this is where I might chime my 2 cents in, where America is taking very poor (and very dangerous) choices. These actions are taking its massive toll, by constantly getting new enemies, while acting as the new big kid in the gutter, that doesnt understand all the small, unwritten rules and restrictions, that come bundled with violent behaviour.

The War on terror supposedly started in 2001, with the joint attack on Afghanistan, in lieu of the 9.11. and was followed by more subsequent attacks, most notable of which was the invasion of Iraq under the position of hidden WMDs. Now we know there werent any. This alone is a totally ignorant, stupid and unwise decision of the Administration. Bringing the troops home, would most definitely save countless more lives than having them crawl in the sand in search of an enemy that doesnt even have a face. And most importantly it would save the USA a hell of a lot of financial troubles in the upcoming years, especially now, that the monetary and fiscal debacle is starting to unveil.

I will leave the conspiracy theories of the TRUE underlying reasons of war, i.e. sustaining the dollars fall, and oil dominion, to people more susceptible to its content. To me it seems the only thing we can learn here, is the confirmation of US senator H. Johnsons quote : "The first casualty when war comes is truth"

As opposed to Iran...this might come as a shock, but why arent they allowed to have nuclear arms, whereas others can ? Especially since the UN comitee watchdogs are issuing generally positive reports? Why dont they have problems with Russia having them, or China, India, North Korea ? IMHO it is EXACTLY this, this stepping on other peoples toes, this ignorance of boundaries, overriding other cultures values with their own, bringing democracy into mesopotamia, meddling into affairs not their own, that even brings a need having to define "torture", or "enemy combatant". Fools words. Again in street terms, if you look for a fight in the wrong neighbourhood, you will more than probably find it.

By the way, I wouldnt be that much worried about the anti Western Islamic terrorist or enemy combatant, that is so terrfyingly portrayed in our hemisphere, I am alot more afraid of incredibly gifted physicists and scientists, which accept the radical findings at the sub atomic level ALOT easier than most, through Islam, with its unique religious ontology.

fas·cism /ˈfæʃɪzəm/ Show Spelled[fash-iz-uhm] Show IPA–noun1.( sometimes initial capital letter ) a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.2.( sometimes initial capital letter ) the philosophy, principles, or methods of fascism.3.( initial capital letter ) a fascist movement, esp. the one established by Mussolini in Italy 1922–43.

**From the start, islam has been a violent, totalitarian political ideology disguised as a religion. Mohammed tortured and murdered any who opposed him and engaged in ethnic cleansing, as well as having a 9 year old wife. When a muslim today asks "What would Mohammed do?" the answer is bomb a subway, cut a head off, slam a plane into a building until the non-muslims are conquered.**

009.029YUSUFALI: Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.PICKTHAL: Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, and forbid not that which Allah hath forbidden by His messenger, and follow not the Religion of Truth, until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low.SHAKIR: Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection. ___________________________________________________________________________________

An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America

by Mohamed AkramMay 19, 1991

View the full document

Summary:

This May 1991 memo was written by Mohamed Akram, a.k.a. Mohamed Adlouni, for the Shura Council of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the introductory letter, Akram referenced a "long-term plan…approved and adopted" by the Shura Council in 1987 and proposed this memo as a supplement to that plan and requested that the memo be added to the agenda for an upcoming Council meeting. Appended to the document is a list of all Muslim Brotherhood organizations in North America as of 1991.

Notable quotes:

*

Enablement of Islam in North America, meaning: establishing an effective and stable Islamic Movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood which adopts Muslims' causes domestically and globally, and which works to expand the observant Muslim base, aims at unifying and directing Muslims' efforts, presents Islam as a civilization alternative, and supports the global Islamic state, wherever it is. *

In order for Islam and its Movement to become "a part of the homeland" in which it lives, "stable" in its land, "rooted" in the spirits and minds of its people, "enabled" in the live [sic] of its society and has firmly-established "organizations" on which the Islamic structure is built and with which the testimony of civilization is achieved, the Movement must plan and struggle to obtain "the keys" and the tools of this process in carry [sic] out this grand mission as a "Civilization Jihadist" responsibility which lies on the shoulders of Muslims and – on top of them – the Muslim Brotherhood in this country.

*

The process of settlement is a "Civilization-Jihadist Proecess" with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who chose to slack. But, would the slackers and the Mujahedeen be equal.

"The War on terror supposedly started in 2001, with the joint attack on Afghanistan, in lieu of the 9.11. and was followed by more subsequent attacks, most notable of which was the invasion of Iraq under the position of hidden WMDs. Now we know there werent any. "

The massive cache of almost 400,000 Iraq war documents released by the WikiLeaks Web site revealed that small amounts of chemical weapons were found in Iraq and continued to surface for years after the 2003 US invasion, Wired magazine reported.

I hope you don't regret it. I'm glad you posted - (as I go on to disagree...)

As a friend to a family of one of the hikers held in Iran as a political pawn to be tried for 'espionage' after solitary confinement for a year and a half, I would say at least that the term Islamic Fascism fits the regime in Iran just fine and that those fighting to spread Islam seek to duplicate that type of regime elsewhere.

In my daughter's Catholic Church the priest was recently arrested for bad behavior, immediately removed from his post, and we know other priests have behaved far worse. But those are NOT the teachings of the Church, those are individuals who violated the teachings of the church. The Bible may also have verses we find objectionable, but my (limited) knowledge of churches and synagogues says that what is taught and preached is peace, love and acceptance. You might recall that the Pope also opposed the war in Iraq for reasons similar to what you cite. I can't say the same for the Muslim clerics in Iraq and Iran preaching and inciting violence.

What existed in Iraq before the invasion was not peace. It was another version of fascism, a totalitarian prison. The Saddam regime was supposedly secular but he was praising Allah in almost every sentence that I read, while oppressing his own people in every way and attacking four of his neighbors prior to the American invasion. The story of Dujail that Saddam was hanged for was an illustration of what Iraqi people faced. I have posted it here as told by a survivor. Mass graves elsewhere make the same point. There would have been nothing moral about having the might to depose Saddam and then pass on it as none of our business IMO, just as there was no easy way to depose him and then leave a power vacuum on his place. Toppling that regime was not violent behavior, quite the opposite; we were also heavily criticized for not toppling it the first time we were there - rescuing a Islamic country. They may think we are the enemy and they may think we came to take the oil (or to manipulate our currency?), but we aren't and we didn't. We shed a lot of our own blood trying hard not to shed theirs. We spent hundreds of billions and took nothing. We tried and tried and tried to set up self rule and leave in peace. We were not the ones fighting AGAINST that. I don't accept that blame.

I also don't accept moral relativism such as stoning a rape victim to death because a religion calls for it. Wrong is wrong. (I know you didn't say otherwise, just posting my viewpoint.) If I can't do anything to stop it, then that is something I have to live with. If I have the opportunity to intervene successfully no matter what neighborhood, then that is what is right to do, whether I do it or not. People can reference KKK or slavery here but those are also behaviors we have shed blood to stop.

Ahmadinejad's Letter to Bush is referenced. The Washington Post translation lacks the ending I read elsewhere, "Wasalam Ala Man Ataba'al hoda". Experts argue the meaning, one translation is: "peace only unto those who follow the true path". The true path is jihad so I take it to mean as Death to America because we are infidels, not on their true path, whereas apologists take it to mean something more like 'have a nice day'. You see Ahmadinejad as an honest broker of peace(?), worthy of nuclear weapons to deter an attack, a legitimate leader of the Iranian people? And Bush as one who turned his back on an opportunity to settle our differences if only we could sit down and discuss? I disagree.

Sorry for the delay. I have had time to reflect on the answers, so forgive me for the long post. I completely understand if it goes below radar for being a wall of text.

Without gibberish, let me get right to the replies.

dear GM, thanks for your response. I have a lot of things on my mind concerning what you just wrote, and to be perfectly honest, I am a bit dissapointed in your blind righteous fury.

first of all. It seems a bit degrading, that you post in response a recycled dictionary entry about a topic, that I am almost finishing my phd thesis on, especially since it is a most complex topic, devoid of any room for discrete simplification. It is specially out of context, because it even expands my idea further. ESPECIALLY since the title of this topic is capitalized as Fascism with a big F. Lets forget the superficial semantics for now.

But ok, if citing dictionaries is your version of discussing humanistic topics, have it this way.

—n1. the religion of Muslims, having the Koran as its sacred scripture and teaching that there is only one God and that Mohammed is his prophet; Mohammedanism2. a. Muslims collectively and their civilization b. the countries where the Muslim religion is predominant

"From the start, islam has been a violent, totalitarian political ideology disguised as a religion."

I cannot see here, or in any other definition OR academic milieu for that matter that labels it as a totalitarian political ideology disguised as a religion. If you really want to continue that thought, you might want to read (or study again) Althusser and Marx, since what you wrote rings very closely to what in his opinion was the ideological role of religion in the social strata. "Mohammed tortured and murdered any who opposed him and engaged in ethnic cleansing, as well as having a 9 year old wife. When a muslim today asks "What would Mohammed do?" the answer is bomb a subway, cut a head off, slam a plane into a building until the non-muslims are conquered."

Ok, I hoped I am speaking with a man, well read in what he is saying, thus I presumed you have read at least partially the Qu'ran and The Bible. After this however, I am getting the impression that I was wrong, since these types of comments really show a harshly ignorant side to what in general you come across as ; a well read, well versed intellectual of the right wing position.

Here is a nice read about violent passages from both scriptures, by the Penn state academic professor of religious studies Phillip Jenkins, I strongly advise you to read it. Just in case, I am going to quote a few more important parts from the article :

"Even Westerners who have never opened the book – especially such people, perhaps – assume that the Koran is filled with calls for militarism and murder, and that those texts shape Islam....

...In the minds of ordinary Christians – and Jews – the Koran teaches savagery and warfare, while the Bible offers a message of love, forgiveness, and charity...

...Commands to kill, to commit ethnic cleansing, to institutionalize segregation, to hate and fear other races and religions . . . all are in the Bible, and occur with a far greater frequency than in the Koran. At every stage, we can argue what the passages in question mean, and certainly whether they should have any relevance for later ages. But the fact remains that the words are there, and their inclusion in the scripture means that they are, literally, canonized, no less than in the Muslim scripture....

...The Bible also alleges divine approval of racism and segregation....In fact, the Bible overflows with “texts of terror,” to borrow a phrase coined by the American theologian Phyllis Trible. The Bible contains far more verses praising or urging bloodshed than does the Koran, and biblical violence is often far more extreme, and marked by more indiscriminate savagery. The Koran often urges believers to fight, yet it also commands that enemies be shown mercy when they surrender. Some frightful portions of the Bible, by contrast, go much further in ordering the total extermination of enemies, of whole families and races – of men, women, and children, and even their livestock, with no quarter granted....

...The difference between the Bible and the Koran is not that one book teaches love while the other proclaims warfare and terrorism, rather it is a matter of how the works are read"

I would hope that douses some of the rampant flame that you carry. Im not singing praises here, of either side. Just opening a new sphere that might force someone to rethink his position, which is what progress should be about, constantly rethinking ones position within a framed dialectic going upwards.

An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America....

Informative article. But I fail to see where it fits in all this. Is it supposed to be an example how all Islam groups are hell bent on the destruction of the USA ?I am sure you can do better. I guess we can also use names like Guy Fawkes, who (wanted to) blew up the houses of parliament and assasinate King James or the Tripura liberation front, that was forcefully converting people to christianity, or the protestant Northern Ireland Orange Volunteers who were coordinating terrorist attacks on catholic churches, or the KKK for that matter as signs that crhistianity uses blatantly senile ways of coercion.

Formally (by Aristotles Organon) your type of argument in a debate is a logical fallacy. Specifically, it is called converse fallacy of accident or Hasty generalization.

There were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after all.

Informative article. Again.

"The massive cache of almost 400,000 Iraq war documents released by the WikiLeaks Web site revealed that small amounts of chemical weapons were found in Iraq and continued to surface for years after the 2003 US invasion, Wired magazine reported."

Ok. If this has been around, and surfacing, A) why hasnt anyone used it as concrete evidence that Iraq has WMDS since -it would most definitely help your political position-, B) why dont we see legions of right wing conservatives jumping up and down for finally having an enforcable and justifyable reason for the 1,121,057,0450 dollars (I think I cant even read this out loud) and C) how come it hasnt been presented to the commissions going there to assess the situation ?

If this is true, it poses all new kinds of state trust issues and expands on what I said above. Administration KNEW they had WMDS, told everyone they didnt find it, and thus for appropriately subjective reasons decided to prolongue their forces stay in Mesopotamia. I am not going to go into more detail here, since I am not well read on it all, but I will quote a few Bush quotes that expand on the matter.

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." --State of the Union Address, Jan. 28, 2003, making a claim that administration officials knew at the time to be false

"You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror." --interview with CBS News' Katie Couric, Sept. 6, 2006

"I think I was unprepared for war." –on the biggest regret of his presidency, ABC News interview, Dec. 1, 2008

"So what?" –President Bush, responding to an ABC News correspondent who pointed out that Al Qaeda wasn't a threat in Iraq until after the U.S. invaded, Dec. 14, 2008

**As a historian, can you explain how the talks between PM Chamberlain and Germany's leader worked out?

I am afraid, I fail to see the connection here, again, especially since the way you reason your comparison is again the same type of argumentative fallacy. I may seem pedantic about this, but, like you demand sources for cited thoughts and ideas in your posts, I demand at least a partially solid argumentative structure.

Ok, even if I take that comment for what it is, are you saying that Bush was in the place of Germany's leader ? Or the other way around ? I would certainly think not the latter, since he hasnt even responded to any initiative, and PM Chamberlain certanly WAS initiating talks, more than once even (on behalf of the sovereign of course). Now, I would gladly expand on the Sudeten Germans, and what several kinds of problems their national identity with Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia as German states pose, but it seems to me that you do not understand what the underlying conditions on both sides were, because the underlying problem of the Iran/USA is completely different. And neither should you, (since it is a very specific and complex issue) unless it is an interest of yours. But lets continue with the topic...

I shall use your last comment as a linking point with DougMacGs post.

hi Doug, thanks for the reply

"The Saddam regime was supposedly secular but he was praising Allah in almost every sentence that I read,.." .....and "A little insight into A-jad's less than rational world-view."

My God of course I dont mean Ahmadinejad was/is a bastion of ratio in the middle east. I am merely trying to point out, that ones subjective implications should be questioned/doubted first, (especially) in hand with such severe one sided criticism. Let me quote some more Bush brilliance, in regards to rational world-view and praising "Him" in what he says.

" I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, 'Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East'. And, by God, I'm gonna do it." Sharm el-Sheikh August 2003.

" I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job."Statement made during campaign visit to Amish community, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Jul. 9, 2004

"One of the great things about this country is a lot of people pray." Washington, D.C., Apr. 13, 2003

"The short-term objective of this country is to find an enemy and bring them to justice before they strike us. The long-term objective is to make this world a more free and hopeful and peaceful place. I believe we'll succeed because freedom is the Almighty God's gift to every man and woman in this world."Portsmouth, Ohio, Sep. 10, 2004

"Well, first of all, you got to understand some of my view on freedom, it's not American's gift to the world. See, freedom is God -- is God given." Interview with TVR, Romania, Nov. 23, 2002

"What existed in Iraq before the invasion was not peace. It was another version of fascism, a totalitarian prison." combined with this "And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq...."

is what is really intriguing me. This self righteous condescending aura of the invasion. Like you did a noble deed. Well you did, I guess, but what bothers me, is why did you choose Iraq ? Because it was a totalitarian fascistic regime ? Suffocating prison, which people had to be freed from ? Hm, here are a few numbers for potential, more suitable candidates to save. And it would entail NOT loosing your own men and NOT gaining as much new enemies.

according to http://www.avert.org/worldstats.htm there were 22.5 million hiv/aids infected children and adults (adult counts as age 15 and up) and 1.3 million deaths in Sub saharan Africa in 2009 alone. Slow down and imagine that, almost like the whole state of Texas, anyone you meet when you go out, and anyone you see, is infected.

a couple of other numbers from conflicts, from the early 90s to 2008 (secondary source wikipedia, search there for primary sources) : Kinshasa civil war, 4 million deaths, Guinnea Bissau, 350 thousand civilians without a piece of iron left to spare, Kenya civil war 200 thousan civilians left without a home or personal belongigs, Mozambique civil war, 1 million deaths, Nigerian civil war, 1.2 million civilian and army deaths, Rwandan genocide, 1 million deaths - 20% of countries population, Sierra Leone 80 thousand deaths, Darfur 350 thousand deaths, almost 3 million displaced, and I havent even counted Somalia, where the UN has plowed around a bit, did nothing, lost a few men and then retreated (with all due respect to all the fallen soldiers. on both sides). All in the name of some national freedom Democratic front.

It might not be appropriate to include this, since I was subjectively involved in it, but what the hell. It connects in part with what I mentioned in first post, about the attitude the US has towards militaristic procedures.

The help we got in the last Balkan War was a gesture worthy of a Shakespearean comedy. Everything from hitting kindergardens, Chinese embassies to bakeries, missing 90% of fired projectiles, to a downed f117 the invisible fighter with a 40 year old soviet RPG weapon, to supporting the "retaking of croatian sovereign territory" in Kninska krajina, which was one of the biggest undercover genocides in the war, apart from Srebrenica, which is a tragedy on its own. It was openly supported by the CIA with intelligence and US air force surveillance. When we went there to bring uncle back home, there were piles upon piles of dismembered and mauled men and adolescents and 10 year old girls, with white grey hair to their waist, raped, searching for their loved ones with tearless cries, wandering alone through the barren lands, , that the guerilla "rambo" forces left in their wake. All in the name of democratic equality of peoples, OF COURSE.

At least thank god for the peacekeepers.

The way the UN/US incursion was portrayed in the western media almost made me vomit in contrast to what it has effectively acheived. This portrayal of war like it is an entertainment blockbuster, like a game of Risk, or a Real Time Strategy video game. Like a John Wayne movie, after he kills all the baddies and rides off in the sunset. Wearing a mission accomplished tag on his back. This is the reason the USA gets so much bad mouthing and enemies.

I must stop now. This is getting out of hand.

I guess after all that, Iraq was THOUGHT to be the best compromise of easy victory, combat heroism and potential ally with mutual benefits afterwards. But as it stands, at least 2 of the 3 goals have turned for the worse.

Sorry for the delay. I have had time to reflect on the answers, so forgive me for the long post. I completely understand if it goes below radar for being a wall of text.

Without gibberish, let me get right to the replies.

dear GM, thanks for your response. I have a lot of things on my mind concerning what you just wrote, and to be perfectly honest, I am a bit dissapointed in your blind righteous fury.

first of all. It seems a bit degrading, that you post in response a recycled dictionary entry about a topic, that I am almost finishing my phd thesis on, especially since it is a most complex topic, devoid of any room for discrete simplification. It is specially out of context, because it even expands my idea further. ESPECIALLY since the title of this topic is capitalized as Fascism with a big F. Lets forget the superficial semantics for now.

But ok, if citing dictionaries is your version of discussing humanistic topics, have it this way.**You disputed the use of the term fascism in describing islamic totalitarianism. Is "islamic totalitarianism" a better term to use? Whenever we discuss a concept, it's important to clarify definitions. If an American guy is in the UK, and a woman asks to come by her flat to knock her up in the morning, he might get the wrong idea what she is asking him to do. The same words can mean different things to different people. The use of islamic fascism to describe the totalitarianism and oppression embedded in islamic theology is accurate, using the definition I am familiar with.**

—n1. the religion of Muslims, having the Koran as its sacred scripture and teaching that there is only one God and that Mohammed is his prophet; Mohammedanism2. a. Muslims collectively and their civilization b. the countries where the Muslim religion is predominant

**And when we examine islam, both in the modern and historic context, we see a it spread at swordpoint, imposing an oppressive theocracy, especially for non-muslims and women it places under it's domination. Mohammed never hesitated to kill those who dared to opose him , or even those that mocked him. Just as today, his followers seek to kill those who dared to draw Mohammed as a cartoon.

"I cannot see here, or in any other definition OR academic milieu for that matter that labels it as a totalitarian political ideology disguised as a religion. If you really want to continue thatthought, you might want to read (or study again) Althusser and Marx, since what you wrote rings very closely to what in his opinion was the ideological role of religion in the socialstrata."

**Christianity's impact on western civilization was to allow for a divide between the spiritual realm and government. "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's...."

Islam has no such divide. In islam, every aspect of a muslim's existance from the more intimate to the function of the legal system and nation-state is dictated by islamic theology. Those from within the muslim world that wish to question these core aspects tend to have the life expectancies of unprotected mob informants. Meanwhile, in the western world, not only is one free to defame christianity, one can often obtain a government grant to do so.

"Ok, I hoped I am speaking with a man, well read in what he is saying, thus I presumed you have read at least partially the Qu'ran and The Bible. After this however, I am getting theimpression that I was wrong, since these types of comments really show a harshly ignorant side to what in general you come across as ; a well read, well versed intellectual of the rightwing position."

What I said about Mohammed is true. Since 9/11/01, I have made a great effort to study islamic theology, aside from the koran, I have read Shahih Muslim and Sahih Burkhari and islamic texts that discuss the sunnah. When a muslim decides to marry a 9 years old girl, he is allowed to do so as it was done by Mohammed. If a muslim decides to smite an unbeliever, again, the verses of the sword mandate he does so. There is no mainstream sect of islam that rejects violent jihad. Meanwhile, there is no mainstream sect of christianity that approves of the spread of christian belief by violence.

Jesus refused his followers a physical kingdom, explaining that his kingdom wasn't of this world. Jesus allowed himself to be defamed, beaten, tortured and executed. He certainly never had anyone whacked for making fun of him.

Spencer, director of JihadWatch.org, is not a man to recoil from difficulties. In his most recent, solid study, he examines the current state of controversies in the United States relating to Islam and Christianity. He exposes the ignorance and misunderstanding that riddle many discourses on religions.

Beginning in the 1960s, the search for common points led too many academics and intellectuals to efface the oppositions among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in order to distinguish essential common points. But the differences are vast: The totalizing Islamic interpretation of revelation gathers together under a single power the spheres of politics, religion, and justice, something unacceptable to the two biblical religions. And while the Bible does not mention Muslims, who, of course, did not exist at the time of its redaction, the Qur'an mentions Jews and Christians in numerous verses, most often negatively. Other differences include the contents of the sacred texts and differing interpretations of the prophethood.

Spencer's work is crucial, given the stakes of today's worldwide jihadist war. For example, he demolishes false equivalence between jihad (a warrior ideology that is structural to Islam and has been deployed across thirteen centuries) and the Crusades (defensive wars spread over two centuries).

He instructs those many in the West who do not understand the possibility of an Islamist-provoked catastrophe putting an end to democracy's comfortable political and social order. More broadly, Westerners rarely perceive that their foreign policies conform to the exigencies of international jihadi strategies—for example, that European leaders are constrained under the threat of reprisals to accept immigration and to restrain their own freedom of expression to appease Muslim sensibilities. This policy of submission permits Islamist propaganda to dominate Western media and campuses.

If Westerners do not understand the ideological language used to justify the suppression of their liberties, if they ignore the historical, juridical, and theological structure of jihad and its corollary, dhimmitude (subjugation of religious minorities), then they will understand nothing about current events. They will become—like their predecessors of whose history they are ignorant—the slaves of their conquerors.

Written in a clear and easy style, and not without humor, Spencer's latest book Religion of Peace? supplies the keys to understanding the challenges that confront us. He provides the knowledge essential to enable Westerners to defend their democratic institutions as well as the fundamental values of freedom and human dignity.

"Informative article. But I fail to see where it fits in all this. Is it supposed to be an example how all Islam groups are hell bent on the destruction of the USA ?I am sure you can do better. I guess we can also use names like Guy Fawkes, who (wanted to) blew up the houses of parliament and assasinate King James or the Tripura liberation front, that was forcefully converting people to christianity, or the protestant Northern Ireland Orange Volunteers who were coordinating terrorist attacks on catholic churches, or the KKK for that matter as signs that crhistianity uses blatantly senile ways of coercion.

Formally (by Aristotles Organon) your type of argument in a debate is a logical fallacy. Specifically, it is called converse fallacy of accident or Hasty generalization."Just as there are those that wage jihad by bomb and gun, there are those that wage a stealth jihad against the western world from within. Does every muslim do this? No. Not every muslim is a jihadist, however every jihadist is a muslim. Unfortunately, they (jihadists) hold the theological upperhand in islam. As I mentioned before, anyone, including muslims that seek to reform islam face real threats to their lives.

How Separation of Church and State Was Read Into the Constitution (Hint: the KKK got its way)

Jim Lindgren • October 20, 2010 3:38 pm

The flap over Christine O’Donnell’s debate comment suggests that many people still don’t know how Separation of Church and State became part of the law of the First Amendment.

On this, I reprint part of an old post from 2005:

6. The phrase “Separation of Church and State,” as Philip Hamburger establishes in his classic book on the subject, is not in the language of the first amendment, was not favored by any influential framer at the time of the first amendment, and was not its purpose.

7. The first mainstream figures to favor separation after the first amendment was adopted were Jefferson supporters in the 1800 election, who were trying to silence Northern clergy critical of the immoral Jeffersonian slaveholders in the South.

8. After the Civil War, liberal Republicans proposed a constitutional amendment to add separation of church and state to the US Constitution by amendment, since it was not already there. After that effort failed, influential people began arguing that it was (magically) in the first amendment.

9. In the last part of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, nativists (including the KKK) popularized separation as an American constitutional principle, eventually leading to a near consensus supporting some form of separation.

10. Separation was a crucial part of the KKK’s jurisprudential agenda. It was included in the Klansman’s Creed (or was it the Klansman’s Kreed?). Before he joined the Court, Justice Black was head of new members for the largest Klan cell in the South. New members of the KKK had to pledge their allegiance to the “eternal separation of Church and State.” In 1947, Black was the author of Everson, the first Supreme Court case to hold that the first amendment’s establishment clause requires separation of church & state. The suit in Everson was brought by an organization that at various times had ties to the KKK.

11. Until this term, the justices were moving away from the separation metaphor, often failing to mention it except in the titles of cited law review articles, but in the last term of the Court they fell back to using it again.

12. As Judge Roberts pithily pointed out in the hearings, only one justice (Breyer) thought that both of the leading establishment clause cases delivered this last term were correctly decided.

033.021YUSUFALI: Ye have indeed in the Messenger of Allah a beautiful pattern (of conduct) for any one whose hope is in Allah and the Final Day, and who engages much in the Praise of Allah.PICKTHAL: Verily in the messenger of Allah ye have a good example for him who looketh unto Allah and the Last Day, and remembereth Allah much.SHAKIR: Certainly you have in the Messenger of Allah an excellent exemplar for him who hopes in Allah and the latter day and remembers Allah much.

The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with 'Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death).

004.034YUSUFALI: Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more (strength) than the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient, and guard in (the husband's) absence what Allah would have them guard. As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (Next), refuse to share their beds, (And last) beat them (lightly); but if they return to obedience, seek not against them Means (of annoyance): For Allah is Most High, great (above you all).PICKTHAL: Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them. Then if they obey you, seek not a way against them. Lo! Allah is ever High, Exalted, Great.SHAKIR: Men are the maintainers of women because Allah has made some of them to excel others and because they spend out of their property; the good women are therefore obedient, guarding the unseen as Allah has guarded; and (as to) those on whose part you fear desertion, admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them; then if they obey you, do not seek a way against them; surely Allah is High, Great.

In chilling detail, the report also elaborates on the close working relationship between Nazi leaders and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who later claimed that he sought refuge in wartime Germany only to avoid arrest by the British.

In fact, the report says, the Muslim leader was paid "an absolute fortune" of 50,000 marks a month (when a German field marshal was making 25,000 marks a year). It also said he energetically recruited Muslims for the SS, the Nazi Party's elite military command, and was promised that he would be installed as the leader of Palestine after German troops drove out the British and exterminated more than 350,000 Jews there.

On Nov. 28, 1941, the authors say, Hitler told Mr. Husseini that the Afrika Corps and German troops deployed from the Caucasus region would liberate Arabs in the Middle East and that "Germany's only objective there would be the destruction of the Jews."

The report details how Mr. Husseini himself was allowed to flee after the war to Syria -- he was in the custody of the French, who did not want to alienate Middle East regimes -- and how high-ranking Nazis escaped from Germany to become advisers to anti-Israeli Arab leaders and "were able to carry on and transmit to others Nazi racial-ideological anti-Semitism."

"You have an actual contract between officials of the Nazi Foreign Ministry with Arab leaders, including Husseini, extending after the war because they saw a cause they believed in," Dr. Breitman said....In October 1945, the report says, the British head of Palestine's Criminal Investigation Division told the assistant American military attaché in Cairo that the mufti might be the only force able to unite the Palestine Arabs and "cool off the Zionists. Of course, we can't do it, but it might not be such a damn bad idea at that."

The contemporary pronouncements of the Islamic Center of Cleveland’s clerical “Imamate”—Fawaz Damra and his erstwhile replacement Ahmed Alzaree—illustrate an ancient, but continuous tradition of anti-Jewish incitement by Islam’s “popular preachers,” very much alive today. And the historical treatment of Jews in Muslim societies—chronic oppression, punctuated by outbursts of mass anti-Jewish violence, forced conversion to Islam, or expulsion—has been consistent with such sacralized religious bigotry. Promoters of modern jihad genocide from the former Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin el-Husseini, to contemporary Hamas clerics, have repeatedly invoked Islam’s Jew-exterminating eschatology.

George Vajda’s 1937 essay “Juifs et Musulmans Selon Le Hadit” (“Jews and Muslims According to the Hadith”)—a magisterial 70-page treatise discussed at some length herein—remains the definitive study of Jews and their relations with Muhammad and Muslims, as depicted in the hadith. Vajda’s research demonstrates how Muslim eschatology highlights the Jews supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjâl—the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ—and as per another tradition, the Dajjâl is in fact Jewish. At his appearance, other traditions state that the Dajjâl will be accompanied by 70,000 Jews from Isfahan, or Jerusalem. When the Dajjâl is defeated, he and his Jewish companions will be slaughtered— everything will deliver them up except for the so-called gharkad tree. Thus, according to a canonical hadith—incorporated into the 1988 Hamas Charter (article 7)—if a Jew seeks refuge under a tree or a stone, these objects will be able to speak to tell a Muslim: “There is a Jew behind me; come and kill him!”

Vajda also emphasizes how the notion of jihad “ransom” extends even into Islamic eschatology casting the Muslims’ sins upon the Jews. And in the corporeal world, Vajda observes, “distrust must reign” in Muslims relations with the rebellious Jews. But it is the Jews stubborn malevolence, Vajda further notes, that is their defining worldly characteristic

Jews are represented in the darkest colors. Convinced by the clear testimony of their books that Mohammed was the true prophet, they refused to convert, out of envy, jealousy and national particularism, even out of private interest. They have falsified their sacred books and do not apply the laws of God; nevertheless, they pursued Mohammed with their raillery and their oaths, and harassed him with questions, an enterprise that turned to their own confusion and merely corroborated the authenticity of the supernatural science of the prophet. From words they moved to action: sorcery, poisoning, assassination held no scruples for them.

Vajda concludes that these archetypes, in turn, justify Muslim animus towards the Jews, and the admonition to at best, “subject [the Jews] to Muslim domination”, as dhimmis, treated “with contempt”, under certain “humiliating arrangements.”

Hartwig Hirschfeld’s detailed analyses of Muhammad’s interactions with the Jews of Medina as depicted in the earliest pious Muslim biographies of Muhammad (sira; sirat) describes the “mutual disappointment” that characterized their relationship, and the predictably disastrous results for the Jews.

The Jews, for their part, were singularly disappointed in their expectations. The way in which Muhammad understood revelation, his ignorance and his clumsiness in religious questions in no way encouraged them to greet him as their Messiah. He tried at first to win them over to his teachings by sweetness and persuasion; they replied by posing once again the questions that they had already asked him; his answers, filled with gross errors, provoked their laughter and mockery. From this, of course, resulted a deep hostility between Muhammad and the Jews, whose only crime was to pass a severe judgment on the enterprise of this Arab who styled himself “God’s prophet” and to find his conduct ridiculous, his knowledge false, and his regulations thoughtless. This judgment, which was well founded, was nevertheless politically incorrect, and the consequences thereof inevitably would prove to be disastrous for a minority that lacked direction or cohesion.

Muhammad’s failures or incomplete successes were consistently recompensed by murderous attacks on the Jews. Thus Muhammad developed a penchant for assassinating individual Jews, and destroying Jewish communities—by expropriation and expulsion (Banu Quaynuqa and Nadir), or massacring their men, and enslaving their women and children (Banu Qurayza). Subsequently, in the case of the Khaybar Jews, Muhammad had the male leadership killed, and plundered their riches. The terrorized Khaybar survivors—industrious Jewish farmers—became prototype subjugated dhimmis whose productivity was extracted by the Muslims as a form of permanent booty. And according to the Muslim sources, even this tenuous vassalage was arbitrarily terminated within a decade of Muhammad’s death when Caliph Umar expelled the Jews of Khaybar.

Muhammad’s brutal conquest and subjugation of the Khaybar Jews, and their subsequent expulsion by one of his companions, the (second) “Rightly Guided” Caliph Umar, epitomize permanent, archetypal behavior patterns Islamic Law deemed appropriate to Muslim interactions with Jews.

I do like Doug's post... Andrew said, "I hope you don't regret it."Doug said, "I'm glad you posted - (as I go on to disagree...)"

Doug also said, "be friends at the end of the day" - Likewise! With a

I too think we need more diverse opinion on this forum. And you seem rather bright and articulate. Good luck with your Phd thesis.

As Doug pointed out, nothing wrong with disagreeing, but...

In response to your post yesterday afternoon GM has deluged you with NINE mostly irrelevant posts. Don't take it personally, that's GM's style; when he doesn't have quality or is not able to address your points, he throws up quantity. Wait, an update; GM is awake and posting even more....Do you ever feel like you are drowning Andrew?

I do think GM has read the books of Islam. Also, I think he is quite knowledgable on the subject; albeit selectively. He chooses to focus only on the bad.

And your point, and my point in the past (I've given up arguing; GM's stamina and quantity of posts is rather impressive) that while Jesus preached forgiveness and kindness; GM ignores the entire Old Testament which is filled with fire and brimstone. Women are treated like chattel, their age difference doesn't matter; multiple wives are fine, and their head better be covered. An eye for an eye revenge dominates and woe onto anyone who worships false idols or strays from the path. Entire cities including women and children are slaughtered at God's direction. Rarely did God of the Old Testament show any mercy. The Jews were God's children and everyone else was basically S#$%. And even the Jews had better follow the line or they too would see God's wrath.

Since Jesus time, wars have been fought, women and children slaughtered, groups ostracized, and intolerance abundant all done in the name of the Christian and Jewish God.

Even the New Testament which preaches forgiveness and kindness on one had, basically takes the attitude that you are with me or against me on the other hand. The believers go to Heaven and the non believers go to Hell.

Now other than the Koran, I have not read many Islamic theological books like you and GM and perhaps others on this forum, however I have read the bible quite thoroughly. So when people quote the Koran or other books, and deplore violence or treatment of women I hope they also have read the Bible from cover to cover. While many Jews and Christians including myself will say that we have "evolved" and "progressed", other devoted and orthodox individuals probably say we have strayed from the true teachings of the Bible. The Bible that punishes without mercy non believers. Sounds similar to the Koran doesn't it?

Andrew, I will leave religion mostly for you and GM. I would only add that I see a distinction between the religion and the book with the religion being what people are preaching, taking from the writings today, or at whatever point in time we are discussing. GM said he studied Islam after 9/11. That point I find important. We didn't go out of our way to find or have an opinion about any other religion. It was brought to us in brutal fashion, over and over and over, so people went to the religion to see if that was inspiring these worldwide actions causing us to fondle ourselves at airports and worry about training camps far away. Far away is now close to home as Zacarias Moussaoui was trained in our town here, we had 24 al Qaida related arrests in Minneapolis this year and I have rental property in a town where 9/11 hijackers lived among us prior to the attacks - with laws you can't discriminate whatsoever about ethnicity religion etc.

You mentioned argumentative structure (to GM) but on the part where you said you were replying to me, you mixed quotations of mine in with bizarre, selective utterances from former President Bush in the same paragraph, even the same sentence, and I did not follow at all on those points. You then re-asked the question, why Iraq, without acknowledging or refuting the partial answers that I gave. If your point is that Bush was not a great communicator on this subject, I don't think anyone here or Bush himself would disagree. (straw argument? Karzai and Bernanke read here, Bush doesn't) You went on to clumsiness in the Balkans, but that was a different President, a different war, for a different reason, though another example of where 'allies' of Europe were of little help and then you mention trouble in Mozambique and elsewhere. But I wrote that "Saddam attacked four of his neighbors" and I hope to make additional points from my point of view regarding security threat.

It was not Bush but every intelligence agency in the world including the Iraqis who thought they had WMDs prior to the invasion. What was not found were stockpiles of WMDs. Not finding stockpiles or biochem labs in full operation is tied to the timetable of war, in effect telling him in September that we will be there in April. That they vanished is worrisome but not telling (to me). You quote the discredited words from the State of the Union speech of some botched or phony Uranium purchase in Niger that became a media storm. The Iraq Study Group, a commission that I think is respected, concluded Saddam was not an immediate threat with nuclear weapons; his program was 5-7 years away from nuclear weapons, meaning an eternity, but 5-7 years has since expired. As we judge now the value of the Iraq effort with Bush long gone, we must judge it versus the reality (with the best information available) that today the world's problems would include an emboldened Saddam Hussein in complete power with nuclear arms. I think you infer that is not frightening to you (or at least with Iran) but it is to me.

Regarding both Iran and Iraq and in the perspective of Hitler and Chamberlain or whoever inside or outside of Germany i would like to make a different point than I read GM to make. The historical issues over WWII to me for today are how could we have acted in a smaller way sooner so that we would not have had what we had - a full blown world war barely won in order to survive. In the context of the intelligence required today, I say we needed to know who/what Hitler was and where he was going before he crossed his first border and if there was no justification to act before, then we needed to act then, with or without allies, as he crossed his first border or his second or his third invasion if the conflict was to be kept smaller. With Iraq they have already crossed that line - repeatedly. With Iran it may be a more subtle question but there are very troubling aspects. They support terrorism outside their borders, the oppress inside their borders and they support the destruction of an ally (Israel) in a way I think is different, more serious and threatening than the position of all the so-called moderate Arab states who also fail to recognize Israel.

The question 'why Iraq' is posed, not to George Bush's utterances, but for those here on this forum. I ask a serious historian challenge of you. Please find and post Saddam Hussein's surrender statement from 1991. I would like to tie a point of mine to that which I read at the time and saved but am unable to locate now to link or quote.

Saddam we all know invaded two of his neighbors and sent bombs into two others, and paid huge huge sums to the families of suicide bombers. The first world trade center bombers were here with Iraqi passports. I think we all agree (?) he had WMD prior to the invasion, he did gas the kurds (?) and mass graves were found(?). The straw issue was whether he cooperated in the 911 attacks. We were not trying to prevent attacks that already occurred (or avenge them); we were trying to prevent the next ones, and he gave plenty of justification, again IMO .

Saddam's ties to al Qaeda were determined ( by the Iraq Study Group) to not be a 'collaborative, operational relationship'. The media and the political opponents, even those who supported the invasion ran opportunistically hogwild with that. But it means only exactly what it says. It does not mean they didn't have cooperation, have a relationship, share a common enemy or plan future cooperation. A year after 9/11 a Democrat, Sen. Fritz Hollings, justifying his pro-war vote entered a chilling Iraqi state newspaper editorial into the congressional record. It speaks in flowery terms and people can deny its meaning, but in affect it names Bin Laden, praises Bin Laden and names the targets of the 9/11/2001 attacks in official Iraqi press two months before the attacks. http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S8525&position=allhttp://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2002_record&page=S8526&position=all

"America says, admitting just like a bird in the midst of a tornado, that Bin Ladin is behind the bombing of its destroyer in Aden. The fearful series of events continues for America and the terror within America gets to the point that the Governor of Texas increases the amount of the award, just as the stubbornness of the other man and his challenge increases. This challenge makes it such that one of his grandchildren comes from Jeddah traveling on the official Saudi Arabia airlines and celebrates with him the marriage of one of the daughters of his companions. Bin Ladin has become a puzzle and a proof also, of the inability of the American federalism and the C.I.A. to uncover the man and uncover his nest. The most advanced organizations of the world cannot find the man and continues to go in cycles in illusion and presuppositions. They still hope that he could come out from his nest one day, they hope that he would come out from his hiding hole and one day they will point at him their missiles and he will join Guevara, Hassan Abu Salama, Kamal Nasser, Kanafani and others. The man responds with a thin smile and replies to the correspondent from Al Jazeera that he will continue to be the obsession and worry of America and the Jews, and that even that night he will practice and work on an exercise called ``How Do You Bomb the White House.'' And because they know that he can get there, they have started to go through their nightmares on their beds and the leaders have had to wear their bulletproof vests.

Meanwhile America has started to pressure the Taliban movement so that it would hand them Bin Ladin, while he continues to smile and still thinks seriously, with the seriousness of the Bedouin of the desert about the way he will try to bomb the Pentagon after he destroys the White House .....

The phenomenon of Bin Ladin is a healthy phenomenon in the Arab spirit. It is a decision and a determination that the stolen Arab self has come to realize after it got bored with promises of its rulers: After it disgusted itself from their abomination and their corruption, the man had to carry the book of God and the Kalashnikov and write on some off white paper ``If you are unable to drive off the Marines from the Kaaba, I will do so.'' It seems that they will be going away because the revolutionary Bin Ladin is insisting very convincingly that he will strike America on the arm that is already hurting. That the man will not be swayed by the plant leaves of Whitman nor by the ``Adventures of Indiana Jones'' and will curse the memory of Frank Sinatra every time he hears his songs."

I assume you know but I point out anyway, the "curse the memory of Frank Sinatra...his songs" means "New York, New York", the other target in addition to naming the White House and the Pentagon attacks with prescient timing. (pre·scient/ˈpreSH(ē)ənt/ Adjective: Having or showing knowledge of events before they take place) With all the self righteousness I can muster, we said after 9/11 that you are with us or you are against us at rooting this out. Everyone in that operation was on only a need to know basis, so prior knowledge of an attack on that scale is very close to evidence of cooperation from my point of view.

Andrew wrote:"The way the UN/US incursion was portrayed in the western media almost made me vomit in contrast to what it has effectively achieved. This portrayal of war like it is an entertainment blockbuster, like a game of Risk, or a Real Time Strategy video game. Like a John Wayne movie, after he kills all the baddies and rides off in the sunset. Wearing a mission accomplished tag on his back. This is the reason the USA gets so much bad mouthing and enemies."

This was true, they had a theme lines and they competed for coverage, you could make popcorn during the commercials, but the U.S. does not control western media (or the clumsiness of Bush's ability to articulate) or the duplicity of political opponents and those attacks were aimed at toppling an oppressor and helping Iraqi Arab Muslim people while Saddam and bin Laden both rejoice at destroying civilians. Bin Laden will point to American acts perceived to be against Islamic nations, omit bloodshed to save Islamic nations or people and the same media gives him a free pass to mis-communicate and build a positive following in Muslim countries and with sympathizers in the west. That is an unfortunate fact of the world we try to be safe in.

" is what is really intriguing me. This self righteous condescending aura of the invasion. Like you did a noble deed. Well you did, I guess, but what bothers me, is why did you choose Iraq ? Because it was a totalitarian fascistic regime ? Suffocating prison, which people had to be freed from ? Hm, here are a few numbers for potential, more suitable candidates to save. And it would entail NOT loosing your own men and NOT gaining as much new enemies."

You make a condescending, sarcastic point I think with "self righteous"..."noble cause", then agreed with it(!) "I guess", list some reasons but importantly leave out all those that involve a security threat, then go on with other possible targets like Mozambique. So I add there needs to be a threat and a justification for others to accept our actions. Then others don't accept it anyway or accept facts as they stroll in like your reaction to reading of WMDs evidence discovered: "if that were true..."

I stated partly in jest during the Iraq debate that there are so many tyrants and so little time to topple them. Note that Khadafi also came clean in that time and had the effort gone better, other bad actors might have re-thought their positions. I joked after Saddam invaded Kuwait that if it is okay to invade neighbors, we should take over Canada, not fight in the Middle East. You make fun of being righteous because of maybe Bush swagger? I take finding the right think to do more seriously? What was the right thing to do about Saddam, then, and Iran, NPRK etc. today?

As we nitpick our definitions, I will point out that "right wing conservative" is an unnecessary redundancy and I plea guilty. In the spirit of writing "without gibberish" I offer in good fun my take from your positions articulated so far that you are studying to be a partisan historian. - Doug - still friends!

IN THE NO-FLY ZONES OF northern and southern Iraq, Saddam Hussein's gunners blindly fired surface-to-air missiles at patrolling American and British warplanes. In Yemen, terrorists seized a group of British Commonwealth and American tourists, and four of the hostages died in a shootout. In Tel Aviv, the U.S. Embassy abruptly closed down after receiving a terrorist threat. Perhaps it was just a typical week in the Middle East. But in a region where no one puts much faith in blind coincidence, last week's conjunction of Iraqi antiaircraft fire and terrorism aimed at the countries that had just bombed Iraq convinced some that a new conspiracy was afoot.Here's what is known so far: Saddam Hussein, who has a long record of supporting terrorism, is trying to rebuild his intelligence network overseas--assets that would allow him to establish a terrorism network. U.S. sources say he is reaching out to Islamic terrorists, including some who may be linked to Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi exile accused of masterminding the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa last summer. U.S. intelligence has had reports of contacts between low-level agents. Saddam and bin Laden have interests--and enemies--in common. Both men want U.S. military forces out of Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden has been calling for all-out war on Americans, using as his main pretext Washington's role in bombing and boycotting Iraq. Now bin Laden is engaged in something of a public-relations offensive, having granted recent interviews, one for NEWSWEEK (following story). He says ""any American who pays taxes to his government'' is a legitimate target.

Saddam's terrorism capability is still small-time, according to senior U.S. officials. ""He's nowhere close to the level of the Iranians or Hizbullah,'' says one. But terrorism may be Iraq's growth industry. An Arab intelligence officer who knows Saddam personally and stays in touch with his clandestine services predicts that ""very soon you will be witnessing large-scale terrorist activity run by the Iraqis.'' The attacks, he says, would be aimed at American and British targets in the Islamic world. Washington is somewhat skeptical, but this source says plans have already been put into action under three ""false flags'': one Palestinian, one Iranian and one ""the al-Qaeda apparatus,'' the loose collection of terrorists who receive bin Laden's patronage. ""All these organizations have representatives in Baghdad,'' says the Arab intelligence officer.

thanks for the responses. Since this is starting to go into the monolith proportions, I will have to take time to study your posts and positions and get back in a couple of days. ATM my freetime priority is elsewhere.

@Doug, you are right, gaps started to appear in my post, specially towards the end, since as I am sure you have noticed, I posted it at about 3 o clock in the morning my time, and finished with some cosmetic corrections at 5. That "right wing" conservative came out wrong, as I now see I could simply say" a more determined Republican" ...partisan historian?? hehee not really. Well I guess it depends what you mean with it. The European sphere of historiography is very much different to the anglosaxon paradigm. Our philosophy and theory of history is still heavily relied on Marxist conception of time (which has nothing to do with his political implications) and of course, the french Annales school.

**Note, this does not mean that Bin Laden and Saddam were BFF. Saddam was a baathist who desired his Iraq to become the power in the ME. Bin Laden wants a global caliphate and has no love for a nation-state outside of that. AQ, as mentioned in the indictment below, also had support from Iran/Hezbollah, who of course hated Saddam, and Iran is a shiite nation and AQ are sunni salafists. They couldn't be more opposite in the islamic beliefs, yet it's believed that many of the bomb-building techniques used by AQ were learned from Hezbollah trainers.**

New York -- A U.S. Federal Grand Jury in New York on Nov. 5 issued anindictment against Usama Bin Laden alleging that he and others engagedin a long-term conspiracy to attack U.S. facilities overseas and tokill American citizens.

The indictment noted that Al Qaeda, Bin Laden's internationalterrorist group, forged alliances with the National Islamic Front inSudan and with the government of Iran and with its associated groupHezballah to "work together against their perceived common enemies inthe West, particularly the United States."

Additionally, the indictment states that Al Qaeda reached an agreementwith Iraq not to work against the regime of Saddam Hussein and thatthey would work cooperatively with Iraq, particularly in weaponsdevelopment.

According to the indictment, Bin Laden's group also tried to recruitAmericans to travel through the United States and the West to delivermessages and to conduct financial transactions to aid their terroristactivities. The indictment also states that Al Qaeda used humanitarianwork as a conduit for transmitting funds to affiliate terroristgroups.

The indictment also states that beginning in 1993, Al Qaeda begantraining Somali tribes to oppose the United Nation's humanitarianeffort in Somalia. In October, members of Al Qaeda participated in anattack on U.S. military personnel where 18 soldiers were killed and 73others wounded in Mogadishu. In another reference, the indictmentnoted that an unnamed "co-conspirator" transported weapons andexplosives from Khartoum to Port Sudan for transshipment to the SaudiArabian peninsula.

The Grand Jury document, which usually does not provide a great amountof details in advance of a prosecution, also stated that Bin Laden and"others" tried to develop chemical weapons and attempted to obtainnuclear weapons components in 1993.

The indictment noted that Bin Laden issued his Declaration of Jihadwith the aim of recruiting others to "kill Americans and encouragedother persons to join the jihad against the American enemy."

WASHINGTON CNN From the Oval Office, President Clinton told the nation Wednesday evening why he ordered new military strikes against Iraq.

The president said Iraqs refusal to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors presented a threat to the entire world.

Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons, Clinton said.

Operation Desert Fox, a strong, sustained series of attacks, will be carried out over several days by U.S. and British forces, Clinton said.

Earlier today I ordered Americas armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces, Clinton said.

Their mission is to attack Iraqs nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors, said Clinton.

Clinton also stated that, while other countries also had weapons of mass destruction, Hussein is in a different category because he has used such weapons against his own people and against his neighbors.

Without delay, diplomacy or warning

The Iraqi leader was given a final warning six weeks ago, Clinton said, when Baghdad promised to cooperate with U.N. inspectors at the last minute just as U.S. warplanes were headed its way.

Along with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain, I made it equally clear that if Saddam failed to cooperate fully we would be prepared to act without delay, diplomacy or warning, Clinton said.

The president said the report handed in Tuesday by Richard Butler, head of the United Nations Special Commission in charge of finding and destroying Iraqi weapons, was stark and sobering.Iraq failed to cooperate with the inspectors and placed new restrictions on them, Clinton said. He said Iraqi officials also destroyed records and moved everything, even the furniture, out of suspected sites before inspectors were allowed in.

In halting our airstrikes in November, I gave Saddam a chance not a license. If we turn our backs on his defiance, the credibility of U.S. power as a check against Saddam will be destroyed, the president explained.

Strikes necessary to stunt weapons programs

Clinton said he made the decision to strike Wednesday with the unanimous agreement of his security advisors.

Timing was important, said the president, because without a strong inspection system in place, Iraq could rebuild its chemical, biological and nuclear programs in a matter of months, not years.

If Saddam can cripple the weapons inspections system and get away with it, he would conclude the international community, led by the United States, has simply lost its will, said Clinton. He would surmise that he has free rein to rebuild his arsenal of destruction.

Clinton also called Hussein a threat to his people and to the security of the world.

The best way to end that threat once and for all is with a new Iraqi government a government ready to live in peace with its neighbors, a government that respects the rights of its people, Clinton said.

Such a change in Baghdad would take time and effort, Clinton said, adding that his administration would work with Iraqi opposition forces.

Saddam Hussein's regime has opened talks with Osama bin Laden, bringing closer the threat of a terrorist attack using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, according to US intelligence sources and Iraqi opposition officials.

The key meeting took place in the Afghan mountains near Kandahar in late December. The Iraqi delegation was led by Farouk Hijazi, Baghdad's ambassador in Turkey and one of Saddam's most powerful secret policemen, who is thought to have offered Bin Laden asylum in Iraq.

The Saudi-born fundamentalist's response is unknown. He is thought to have rejected earlier Iraqi advances, disapproving of the Saddam Hussein's secular Baathist regime. But analysts believe that Bin Laden's bolthole in Afghanistan, where he has lived for the past three years, is now in doubt as a result of increasing US and Saudi government pressure.

News of the negotiations emerged in a week when the US attorney general, Janet Reno, warned the Senate that a terrorist attack involving weapons of mass destruction was a growing concern. "There's a threat, and it's real," Ms Reno said, adding that such weapons "are being considered for use."

US embassies around the world are on heightened alert as a result of threats believed to emanate from followers of Bin Laden, who has been indicted by a US court for orchestrating the bombing last August of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which 259 people died. US delegations in Africa and the Gulf have been shut down in recent weeks after credible threats were received.

In this year's budget, President Clinton called for an additional $2 billion to spend on counter-terrorist measures, including extra guards for US embassies around the world and funds for executive jets to fly rapid response investigative teams to terrorist incidents around the world.

Since RAF bombers took part in air raids on Iraq in December, Bin Laden declared that he considered British citizens to be justifiable targets. Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of CIA counter-terrorist operations, said: "Hijazi went to Afghanistan in December and met with Osama, with the knowledge of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. We are sure about that. What is the source of some speculation is what transpired."

An acting US counter-intelligence official confirmed the report. "Our understanding over what happened matches your account, but there's no one here who is going to comment on it."

Ahmed Allawi, a senior member of the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC), based in London, said he had heard reports of the December meeting which he believed to be accurate. "There is a long history of contacts between Mukhabarat [Iraqi secret service] and Osama bin Laden," he said. Mr Hijazi, formerly director of external operations for Iraqi intelligence, was "the perfect man to send to Afghanistan".

Analysts believe that Mr Hijazi offered Mr bin Laden asylum in Iraq, most likely in return for co-operation in launching attacks on US and Saudi targets. Iraqi agents are believed to have made a similar offer to the Saudi maverick leader in the early 1990s when he was based in Sudan.

Although he rejected the offer then, Mamoun Fandy, a professor of Middle East politics at Georgetown University, said Bin Laden's position in Afghanistan is no longer secure after the Saudi monarchy cut off diplomatic relations with, and funding for, the Taleban militia movement, which controls most of the country.

Mr Fandy said senior members of the Saudi royal family told him in recent weeks that they had received assurances from the Taleban leader, Mullah Mohamed Omar, that once the radical Islamist movement secured control over Afghan territory, Bin Laden would be forced to leave. "It's a matter of time now for Osama." He said Bin Laden would have a strong ideological aversion to accepting Iraqi hospitality, but might have little choice.

ROME (AFP) – An Italian court upped the sentences for 23 CIA agents convicted in absentia of abducting an Egyptian imam in one of the biggest cases against the US "extraordinary rendition" programme.

The 23 CIA agents, originally sentenced in November 2009 to five to eight years in prison, had their sentences increased to seven to nine years on appeal in what one of the defence lawyers described as a "shocking blow" for the US.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism -- aside from Predator missile strikes -- for taking suspected terrorists off the street.

The rendition program became a source of embarrassment for the CIA, and a target of international scorn, as details emerged in recent years of botched captures, mistaken identities and allegations that prisoners were turned over to countries where they were tortured.

The European Parliament condemned renditions as "an illegal instrument used by the United States." Prisoners swept up in the program have sued the CIA as well as a Boeing Co. subsidiary accused of working with the agency on dozens of rendition flights.

But the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration's war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard.**Let's see, keeping Gitmo open, blowing up jihadis in Pakistan with hellfire missiles, keeping the rendition program running, and tax cuts for the rich? I'm starting to like the cut of this president's jib!

So maybe we aren't reading our friends in the liberal media as carefully as we should. Earlier this month several media sources reported that the Obama Administration will soon resume trying Guantanamo detainees in military tribunals, almost a year to the day after the prison was supposed to have been closed for good. Yet somehow we missed the avalanche of commentary denouncing "kangaroo courts," "legal black holes" and all the other epithets once reserved for the Bush Administration when it was doing precisely the same thing. Critics in Europe are also notably silent.

That said, we welcome evidence of liberal maturity in the war on terror, and in the last two years the Administration has been growing up faster than expected. The decision to resume the tribunals was forced by the Democratic Congress's decision in December to forbid the Pentagon from spending money to transfer Gitmo's remaining detainees to the U.S. mainland.

Barring that option, the Administration's only choices were to re-open the tribunals, hold the prisoners indefinitely without trial, or otherwise let them go. Given that the recidivism rate of released Gitmo detainees is estimated at 25%, we'd say the Administration is choosing wisely.

And justly. Among the first detainees likely to be tried in the tribunals is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the Saudi mastermind of the 2000 USS Cole bombing in which 17 U.S. sailors were killed. The relatives of Nashiri's victims deserve a verdict.

And the American people deserve a trial that won't be turned into a legal farce, which is what nearly happened last year in New York when terrorist Ahmed Ghailani was acquitted of 284 of the 285 counts held against him. This week Ghailani received a life sentence on that charge, saving the Administration from what might have been a major embarrassment.

Still, it's worth noting that even as the Administration prepares to try some 30 detainees, it also plans to hold another 50 without trial. We won't hold our breath awaiting the outpouring of liberal outrage. But we do breathe a sigh of relief that President Obama has seen the wisdom of his predecessor's ways.

Judicial modesty in the war on terror is rare, so it's a pleasure to highlight this week's vindication of the principle that government officials can't be sued for their national security decisions. South Carolina District Judge Richard Mark Gergel dismissed all claims against a group of Bush Administration officials, including Donald Rumseld and Robert Gates, in a case brought by a terrorist and his lawyers at the ACLU and the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School.

Jose Padilla was arrested in Chicago in 2002 amid a suspected plot to detonate a dirty bomb on U.S. soil. President Bush named him an enemy combatant—a decision that was exhaustively litigated, and the Bush Justice Department won in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. In 2006 Padilla was transferred into civilian custody, granted every due process protection, convicted in a Miami court, sentenced to 17 years—and then filed civil lawsuits from his maximum-security prison cell claiming his constitutional rights had been violated.

Congress has never created a private right of action for damages against government officials for alleged constitutional deprivations, so Padilla and his white-shoe lawyers sued under the Supreme Court's 1971 Bivens decision. Bivens applied to an unlawful search, but since the mid-1980s the courts have declined to apply this standard to new contexts. In order to create new remedies, judges have to find extraordinary circumstances and then weigh the costs to government institutions and society at large.

Judge Gergel declined, writing that "one could easily imagine a massive discovery assault on the intelligence agencies of the United States Government," including subpoenas and depositions of officials with the highest national-security clearances. Litigation, he writes, risks exposing intelligence sources and methods and "A trial on the merits would be an international spectacle with Padilla, a convicted terrorist, summoning America's present and former leaders to a federal courthouse to answer his charges."

That is precisely the goal of the legal anti-antiterror left, which is using sham tort claims to intimidate anyone who believes terrorists should be treated differently than common criminals. Their goal is to abuse the courts to bankrupt the Bush officials who played key roles in the war on terror—the only option left for them, having failed to persuade a Democratic Congress and now even President Obama. Since our friends on the left will want to know, we don't mind reporting that Judge Gergel was nominated by Mr. Obama.

The reason government officials have broad legal immunity (save for criminal acts) is so they can carry out their duties in the best interest of the country without fear of personal liability. If political appointees can be sued later for their decisions, the government will be run by trial lawyers, not elected officials. Yet Padilla's lawsuit on similar grounds against former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo was waved through by a California district court and is now on appeal before the Ninth Circuit.

Judge Gergel deserves credit for choking off this agenda before it does any more damage, but Mr. Yoo may not be so lucky given the political inclinations on the left coast. We'll decline to speculate on the reasons so many in the media and political class seem to favor a terrorist who keeps losing over a former official who acted in good faith to defend America.

Last month, the website Politico reported that the Department of Justice dropped its representation of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his former deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and other defendants in a lawsuit filed by convicted al-Qaida operative Jose Padilla and his mother. The Department of Justice continues to represent Defense Secretary Robert Gates, but no longer the Bushies.

Padilla, you may recall, is an American citizen who was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport in 2002; authorities claimed that he was plotting to set off a radioactive "dirty bomb." After the Bush administration designated Padilla as an "enemy combatant," he was held in a South Carolina Navy brig for 44 months.

Padilla was not convicted for plotting a U.S. terrorist attack -- largely because the case against him was built on information gleaned during harsh interrogations. But in 2007, Padilla was convicted for "conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim persons in a foreign country" and "material support for terrorism." A judge sentenced him to 17 years in prison.

From his cell, Padilla now is suing Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others on the grounds that his "enemy combatant" status, military detention and the harsh interrogations -- the use of stress positions, sleep deprivation and threats -- were unconstitutional. The suit originally named former Attorney General John Ashcroft, a number of lower-level officials from the brig and 48 unnamed John Does -- including guards and orderlies whose name tags were covered -- against whom Padilla later dropped his complaint.

Last month, U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel of South Carolina threw out Padilla's suit.

In a way, it doesn't matter. Padilla can't lose. He's in prison already. It won't hurt him to appeal Gergel. In 2005, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Padilla's military detention -- and still he can sue. The ACLU is involved. Padilla is only seeking $1 in damages -- but the big money, as far as taxpayers are concerned, is in the legal fees his attorneys seek.

In the meantime, defendants have had to live with a nightmare hovering over their heads. Now they face the added expense of legal bills to defend themselves for defending this country. The DOJ only pays legal fees of up to $200 per hour. Former CIA attorney W. George Jameson observed, "$200 an hour, that's kind of a junior attorney in a big law firm. That doesn't get you very far."

Padilla also is suing former Justice Department official John Yoo for writing memos that authorized the use of harsh interrogation techniques. In 2009, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of San Francisco ruled that the case against Yoo, who was told to hire a private attorney, can go forward. Please note: The courts haven't looked at whether Padilla's charges are factual.

Jameson recently co-founded the nonprofit Council on Intelligence Issues to provide legal assistance and other services to current and former intelligence officers. The Politico story, he told me, made the intelligence community somewhat nervous, although "it's hard to tell how nervous to be." It depends on why the DOJ did what it did.

Jameson tells me it is not uncommon for the feds to drop representation when there is disagreement on a case. It can be advantageous for a defendant to have a private attorney if the feds are lukewarm. One reason he is not as troubled as you might expect: "I think the president understands the importance of continuity."

Fair enough, but in dropping the Padilla defendants, Justice changed course in what seems to be a partisan move.

I fear for the next set of John Does. They're not going to be able to afford $1,000-per-hour attorneys who specialize in this area of litigation.

In August 2001, FBI supervisors impeded agents' efforts to get a search warrant for Zacarias Moussaoui's laptop. He later pleaded guilty to helping plan 9/11. Want more?

I feel for the muckety-mucks, too. They must go to sleep painfully aware that their public service now can mean endless litigation tomorrow. If they anger the other political spectrum's lawyers, the reward will be depositions, attorney consultations -- and now more likely, the lion's share of the legal tab.

By EVAN PEREZ New rules allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades.

The move is one of the Obama administration's most significant revisions to rules governing the investigation of terror suspects in the U.S. And it potentially opens a new political tussle over national security policy, as the administration marks another step back from pre-election criticism of unorthodox counterterror methods.

The Supreme Court's 1966 Miranda ruling obligates law-enforcement officials to advise suspects of their rights to remain silent and to have an attorney present for questioning. A 1984 decision amended that by allowing the questioning of suspects for a limited time before issuing the warning in cases where public safety was at issue.

That exception was seen as a limited device to be used only in cases of an imminent safety threat, but the new rules give interrogators more latitude and flexibility to define what counts as an appropriate circumstance to waive Miranda rights.

A Federal Bureau of Investigation memorandum reviewed by The Wall Street Journal says the policy applies to "exceptional cases" where investigators "conclude that continued unwarned interrogation is necessary to collect valuable and timely intelligence not related to any immediate threat." Such action would need prior approval from FBI supervisors and Justice Department lawyers, according to the memo, which was issued in December but not made public.

A Process for Questioning DetaineesFrom Miranda v. Arizona ruling: "Prior to any questioning, the person must be warned that he has a right to remain silent, that any statement he does make may be used as evidence against him, and that he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed. The defendant may waive effectuation of these rights, provided the waiver is made voluntarily, knowingly and intelligently."

—Chief Justice Earl Warren, 1966

Miranda v. Arizona (1966)

Landmark ruling, citing the Fifth Amendment, says suspects must be reminded of their right to avoid self incrimination.

Rhode Island v. Innis (1980)

Police can't perform questioning or its "functional equivalent" if a suspect requests an attorney.

New York v. Quarles (1984)

Police don't have to read Miranda rights if there are "overriding considerations of public safety."

Dickerson v. United States (2000)

Congress can't void Miranda rights through law.

Missouri v. Seibert (2004)

Police can't obtain a confession without a Miranda warning, then provide one and immediately obtain a second confession.

Berghuis v. Thompkins (2010)

Suspects don't have to explicitly waive their Miranda rights for a confession to be admissible..Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, said the memo ensures that "law enforcement has the ability to question suspected terrorists without immediately providing Miranda warnings when the interrogation is reasonably prompted by immediate concern for the safety of the public or the agents." He said "the threat posed by terrorist organizations and the nature of their attacks—which can include multiple accomplices and interconnected plots—creates fundamentally different public safety concerns than traditional criminal cases."

Attorney General Eric Holder suggested changing the guidelines last year after dust-ups over Miranda's use in two major domestic-terror arrests. The suspect in the Christmas Day 2009 bombing, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was questioned by FBI agents for less than an hour before being read his rights. Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad was questioned for three hours.

In both cases, the administration said suspects provided valuable information to the FBI despite being advised of their rights. But the decision nonetheless provoked criticism from Republicans and some Democrats who said an opportunity to gain time-sensitive intelligence was lost.

The new guidelines could blunt criticism from Republicans, many of whom have pushed for terror suspects to be sent to military detention, where they argue that rigid Miranda restrictions don't apply. But many liberals will likely oppose the move, as might some conservatives who believe the administration doesn't have legal authority to rein in such rights.

The Justice Department believes it has the authority to tinker with Miranda procedures. Making the change administratively rather than through legislation in Congress, however, presents legal risks.

"I don't think the administration can accomplish what I think needs to be done by policy guidance alone," said California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. "It may not withstand the scrutiny of the courts in the absence of legislation."

New York Republican Peter King, chairman of the House homeland-security committee, is among the lawmakers who welcomed Mr. Holder's call to change Miranda. At a hearing last year, Mr. King said, "It's important that we ensure that the reforms do go forward and that at the very least the attorney general consults with everyone in the intelligence community before any Miranda warning is given."

The administration suggested legislation last year to alter Miranda but was rebuffed by Congress, administration officials said. Its proposals faltered due to objections from Democrats, who had no appetite for tinkering with Supreme Court precedent, and Republicans who aired civil-liberties concerns or rejected civilian custody for terror suspects.

The Miranda protocols have been controversial since the high court formalized a practice that was already in use by the FBI, albeit not uniformly. Conservatives have long argued that the warning impedes law enforcement's ability to protect the public.

President Barack Obama has grappled with a web of terrorism policies cobbled together since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Before becoming president, Mr. Obama had criticized the Bush administration for going outside traditional criminal procedures to deal with terror suspects, and for bypassing Congress in making rules to handle detainees after 9/11. He has since embraced many of the same policies while devising additional ones—to the disappointment of civil-liberties groups that championed his election. In recent weeks, the administration formalized procedures for indefinitely detaining some suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, allowing for periodic reviews of those deemed too dangerous to set free.

The Bush administration, in the aftermath of 9/11, chose to bypass the Miranda issue altogether as it crafted a military-detention system that fell outside the rules that govern civilians. Under Mr. Bush, the government used Miranda in multiple terror cases. But Mr. Bush also ordered the detention of two people in a military brig as "enemy combatants." The government eventually moved both suspects—Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, and Ali al-Marri, a Qatari man—into the federal criminal-justice system after facing legal challenges. In other cases, it processed suspects through the civilian system.

An increase in the number of domestic-terror cases in recent years has made the issue more pressing.

The Miranda change leaves other key procedures in place, notably federal rules for speedy presentation of suspects before a magistrate, normally within 24 hours. Legal experts say those restrictions are bigger obstacles than Miranda to intelligence gathering. The FBI memo doesn't make clear whether investigators seeking exemptions would have to provide a Miranda warning at the time of such a hearing.

Also unchanged is the fact that any statements suspects give during such pre-Miranda questioning wouldn't be admissible in court, the memo says.

Although calling America an empire irks me, and I think the following piece by Stratfor's George Friedman unfair in how little respect it gives to the resolution Bush got from Congress authorizing Iraq-2, overall the piece addresses in a serious manner matters that do need serious consideration.=====================================What Happened to the American Declaration of War? March 29, 2011

By George Friedman

In my book “The Next Decade,” I spend a good deal of time considering the relation of the American Empire to the American Republic and the threat the empire poses to the republic. If there is a single point where these matters converge, it is in the constitutional requirement that Congress approve wars through a declaration of war and in the abandonment of this requirement since World War II. This is the point where the burdens and interests of the United States as a global empire collide with the principles and rights of the United States as a republic.

World War II was the last war the United States fought with a formal declaration of war. The wars fought since have had congressional approval, both in the sense that resolutions were passed and that Congress appropriated funds, but the Constitution is explicit in requiring a formal declaration. It does so for two reasons, I think. The first is to prevent the president from taking the country to war without the consent of the governed, as represented by Congress. Second, by providing for a specific path to war, it provides the president power and legitimacy he would not have without that declaration; it both restrains the president and empowers him. Not only does it make his position as commander in chief unassailable by authorizing military action, it creates shared responsibility for war. A declaration of war informs the public of the burdens they will have to bear by leaving no doubt that Congress has decided on a new order — war — with how each member of Congress voted made known to the public.

Almost all Americans have heard Franklin Roosevelt’s speech to Congress on Dec. 8, 1941: “Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan … I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, Dec. 7, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.”

It was a moment of majesty and sobriety, and with Congress’ affirmation, represented the unquestioned will of the republic. There was no going back, and there was no question that the burden would be borne. True, the Japanese had attacked the United States, making getting the declaration easier. But that’s what the founders intended: Going to war should be difficult; once at war, the commander in chief’s authority should be unquestionable.

Forgoing the Declaration

It is odd, therefore, that presidents who need that authorization badly should forgo pursuing it. Not doing so has led to seriously failed presidencies: Harry Truman in Korea, unable to seek another term; Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, also unable to seek a new term; George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, completing his terms but enormously unpopular. There was more to this than undeclared wars, but that the legitimacy of each war was questioned and became a contentious political issue certainly is rooted in the failure to follow constitutional pathways.

In understanding how war and constitutional norms became separated, we must begin with the first major undeclared war in American history (the Civil War was not a foreign war), Korea. When North Korea invaded South Korea, Truman took recourse to the new U.N. Security Council. He wanted international sanction for the war and was able to get it because the Soviet representatives happened to be boycotting the Security Council over other issues at the time.

Truman’s view was that U.N. sanction for the war superseded the requirement for a declaration of war in two ways. First, it was not a war in the strict sense, he argued, but a “police action” under the U.N. Charter. Second, the U.N. Charter constituted a treaty, therefore implicitly binding the United States to go to war if the United Nations so ordered. Whether Congress’ authorization to join the United Nations both obligated the United States to wage war at U.N. behest, obviating the need for declarations of war because Congress had already authorized police actions, is an interesting question. Whatever the answer, Truman set a precedent that wars could be waged without congressional declarations of war and that other actions — from treaties to resolutions to budgetary authorizations — mooted declarations of war.

If this was the founding precedent, the deepest argument for the irrelevancy of the declaration of war is to be found in nuclear weapons. Starting in the 1950s, paralleling the Korean War, was the increasing risk of nuclear war. It was understood that if nuclear war occurred, either through an attack by the Soviets or a first strike by the United States, time and secrecy made a prior declaration of war by Congress impossible. In the expected scenario of a Soviet first strike, there would be only minutes for the president to authorize counterstrikes and no time for constitutional niceties. In that sense, it was argued fairly persuasively that the Constitution had become irrelevant to the military realities facing the republic.

Nuclear war was seen as the most realistic war-fighting scenario, with all other forms of war trivial in comparison. Just as nuclear weapons came to be called “strategic weapons” with other weapons of war occupying a lesser space, nuclear war became identical with war in general. If that was so, then constitutional procedures that could not be applied to nuclear war were simply no longer relevant.

Paradoxically, if nuclear warfare represented the highest level of warfare, there developed at the lowest level covert operations. Apart from the nuclear confrontation with the Soviets, there was an intense covert war, from back alleys in Europe to the Congo, Indochina to Latin America. Indeed, it was waged everywhere precisely because the threat of nuclear war was so terrible: Covert warfare became a prudent alternative. All of these operations had to be deniable. An attempt to assassinate a Soviet agent or raise a secret army to face a Soviet secret army could not be validated with a declaration of war. The Cold War was a series of interconnected but discrete operations, fought with secret forces whose very principle was deniability. How could declarations of war be expected in operations so small in size that had to be kept secret from Congress anyway?

There was then the need to support allies, particularly in sending advisers to train their armies. These advisers were not there to engage in combat but to advise those who did. In many cases, this became an artificial distinction: The advisers accompanied their students on missions, and some died. But this was not war in any conventional sense of the term. And therefore, the declaration of war didn’t apply.

By the time Vietnam came up, the transition from military assistance to advisers to advisers in combat to U.S. forces at war was so subtle that there was no moment to which you could point that said that we were now in a state of war where previously we weren’t. Rather than ask for a declaration of war, Johnson used an incident in the Tonkin Gulf to get a congressional resolution that he interpreted as being the equivalent of war. The problem here was that it was not clear that had he asked for a formal declaration of war he would have gotten one. Johnson didn’t take that chance.

What Johnson did was use Cold War precedents, from the Korean War, to nuclear warfare, to covert operations to the subtle distinctions of contemporary warfare in order to wage a substantial and extended war based on the Tonkin Gulf resolution — which Congress clearly didn’t see as a declaration of war — instead of asking for a formal declaration. And this represented the breakpoint. In Vietnam, the issue was not some legal or practical justification for not asking for a declaration. Rather, it was a political consideration.

Johnson did not know that he could get a declaration; the public might not be prepared to go to war. For this reason, rather than ask for a declaration, he used all the prior precedents to simply go to war without a declaration. In my view, that was the moment the declaration of war as a constitutional imperative collapsed. And in my view, so did the Johnson presidency. In hindsight, he needed a declaration badly, and if he could not get it, Vietnam would have been lost, and so may have been his presidency. Since Vietnam was lost anyway from lack of public consensus, his decision was a mistake. But it set the stage for everything that came after — war by resolution rather than by formal constitutional process.

After the war, Congress created the War Powers Act in recognition that wars might commence before congressional approval could be given. However, rather than returning to the constitutional method of the Declaration of War, which can be given after the commencement of war if necessary (consider World War II) Congress chose to bypass declarations of war in favor of resolutions allowing wars. Their reason was the same as the president’s: It was politically safer to authorize a war already under way than to invoke declarations of war.

All of this arose within the assertion that the president’s powers as commander in chief authorized him to engage in warfare without a congressional declaration of war, an idea that came in full force in the context of nuclear war and then was extended to the broader idea that all wars were at the discretion of the president. From my simple reading, the Constitution is fairly clear on the subject: Congress is given the power to declare war. At that moment, the president as commander in chief is free to prosecute the war as he thinks best. But constitutional law and the language of the Constitution seem to have diverged. It is a complex field of study, obviously.

An Increasing Tempo of Operations

All of this came just before the United States emerged as the world’s single global power — a global empire — that by definition would be waging war at an increased tempo, from Kuwait, to Haiti, to Kosovo, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, and so on in an ever-increasing number of operations. And now in Libya, we have reached the point that even resolutions are no longer needed.

It is said that there is no precedent for fighting al Qaeda, for example, because it is not a nation but a subnational group. Therefore, Bush could not reasonably have been expected to ask for a declaration of war. But there is precedent: Thomas Jefferson asked for and received a declaration of war against the Barbary pirates. This authorized Jefferson to wage war against a subnational group of pirates as if they were a nation.

Had Bush requested a declaration of war on al Qaeda on Sept. 12, 2001, I suspect it would have been granted overwhelmingly, and the public would have understood that the United States was now at war for as long as the president thought wise. The president would have been free to carry out operations as he saw fit. Roosevelt did not have to ask for special permission to invade Guadalcanal, send troops to India, or invade North Africa. In the course of fighting Japan, Germany and Italy, it was understood that he was free to wage war as he thought fit. In the same sense, a declaration of war on Sept. 12 would have freed him to fight al Qaeda wherever they were or to move to block them wherever the president saw fit.

Leaving aside the military wisdom of Afghanistan or Iraq, the legal and moral foundations would have been clear — so long as the president as commander in chief saw an action as needed to defeat al Qaeda, it could be taken. Similarly, as commander in chief, Roosevelt usurped constitutional rights for citizens in many ways, from censorship to internment camps for Japanese-Americans. Prisoners of war not adhering to the Geneva Conventions were shot by military tribunal — or without. In a state of war, different laws and expectations exist than during peace. Many of the arguments against Bush-era intrusions on privacy also could have been made against Roosevelt. But Roosevelt had a declaration of war and full authority as commander in chief during war. Bush did not. He worked in twilight between war and peace.

One of the dilemmas that could have been avoided was the massive confusion of whether the United States was engaged in hunting down a criminal conspiracy or waging war on a foreign enemy. If the former, then the goal is to punish the guilty. If the latter, then the goal is to destroy the enemy. Imagine that after Pearl Harbor, FDR had promised to hunt down every pilot who attacked Pearl Harbor and bring them to justice, rather than calling for a declaration of war against a hostile nation and all who bore arms on its behalf regardless of what they had done. The goal in war is to prevent the other side from acting, not to punish the actors.

The Importance of the Declaration

A declaration of war, I am arguing, is an essential aspect of war fighting particularly for the republic when engaged in frequent wars. It achieves a number of things. First, it holds both Congress and the president equally responsible for the decision, and does so unambiguously. Second, it affirms to the people that their lives have now changed and that they will be bearing burdens. Third, it gives the president the political and moral authority he needs to wage war on their behalf and forces everyone to share in the moral responsibility of war. And finally, by submitting it to a political process, many wars might be avoided. When we look at some of our wars after World War II it is not clear they had to be fought in the national interest, nor is it clear that the presidents would not have been better remembered if they had been restrained. A declaration of war both frees and restrains the president, as it was meant to do.

I began by talking about the American empire. I won’t make the argument on that here, but simply assert it. What is most important is that the republic not be overwhelmed in the course of pursuing imperial goals. The declaration of war is precisely the point at which imperial interests can overwhelm republican prerogatives.

There are enormous complexities here. Nuclear war has not been abolished. The United States has treaty obligations to the United Nations and other countries. Covert operations are essential, as is military assistance, both of which can lead to war. I am not making the argument that constant accommodation to reality does not have to be made. I am making the argument that the suspension of Section 8 of Article I as if it is possible to amend the Constitution with a wink and nod represents a mortal threat to the republic. If this can be done, what can’t be done?

My readers will know that I am far from squeamish about war. I have questions about Libya, for example, but I am open to the idea that it is a low-cost, politically appropriate measure. But I am not open to the possibility that quickly after the commencement of hostilities the president need not receive authority to wage war from Congress. And I am arguing that neither the Congress nor the president have the authority to substitute resolutions for declarations of war. Nor should either want to. Politically, this has too often led to disaster for presidents. Morally, committing the lives of citizens to waging war requires meticulous attention to the law and proprieties.

As our international power and interests surge, it would seem reasonable that our commitment to republican principles would surge. These commitments appear inconvenient. They are meant to be. War is a serious matter, and presidents and particularly Congresses should be inconvenienced on the road to war. Members of Congress should not be able to hide behind ambiguous resolutions only to turn on the president during difficult times, claiming that they did not mean what they voted for. A vote on a declaration of war ends that. It also prevents a president from acting as king by default. Above all, it prevents the public from pretending to be victims when their leaders take them to war. The possibility of war will concentrate the mind of a distracted public like nothing else. It turns voting into a life-or-death matter, a tonic for our adolescent body politic.